[lit-ideas] MIT students submit random-generated papers to a conf and get accepted
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2005 18:21:15 -0700
(big deal. Eng Lit profs have been doing this for decades. -- andreas)
A bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has
been accepted
at a scientific conference in a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts
Institute of
Technology (MIT).
Jeremy Stribling said that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned
the standards
of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate
research papers
complete with nonsensical text, charts and diagrams.
The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World
Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled
to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
To their surprise, one of the papers - "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical
Unification of
Access Points and Redundancy" - was accepted for presentation.
The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist Alan
Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths, falsehoods, non
sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo published in the journal
Social Text.
Mr Stribling said he and his colleagues only learned about the Social Text
affair after submitting their paper.
"Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our heuristic
consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active
networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We
implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with
opportunistically pipelined extensions".
Notorious
Mr Stribling said the trio targeted WMSCI because it is notorious within the
field of computer science for sending copious emails that solicit admissions
to the conference.
"We were tired of the spam," Mr Stribling told Reuters in a telephone
interview, adding that his team wanted to challenge the standards of the
conference's
peer review process.
Nagib Callaos, a conference organiser, said the paper was one of a small
number accepted on a "non-reviewed" basis - meaning that reviewers had not yet
given their feedback by the acceptance deadline.
"We thought that it might be unfair to refuse a paper that was not refused
by any of its three selected reviewers," Mr Callaos wrote in an email.
"The author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility of the
content of their paper."
However, Mr Callaos said conference organisers were reviewing their
acceptance procedures in light of the hoax.
Asked whether he would dis-invite the MIT students, Callaos replied: "Bogus
papers should not be included in the conference program".
Mr Stribling said conference organisers had not yet formally rescinded their
invitation to present the paper.
The students were soliciting cash donations so they could attend the
conference and give what Mr Stribling billed as a "randomly generated talk".
So far, they have raised more than $US2,000 ($2,601) over the Internet.
[The paper in question, and the random scientific paper generator, can be found
at
http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scigen/ (from
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200504/s1345732.htm) ]
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