Confirming what we all knew....

 

Scientific Conference Falls for Gibberish Prank

 

By Greg Frost

 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) - 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.

 

Jeremy Stribling said on Thursday 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.

 

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."

 

Stribling said the trio targeted WMSCI because it is notorious within the field of computer science for sending copious e-mails that solicit admissions to the conference.

 

"We were tired of the spam," 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 organizer, 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," Callaos wrote in an e-mail. "The author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility of the content of their paper."

 

However, Callaos said conference organizers were reviewing their acceptance procedures in light of the hoax. Asked whether he would disinvite the MIT students, he replied: "Bogus papers should not be included in the conference program."

 

Stribling said conference organizers 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 Stribling billed as a "randomly generated talk." So far, they have raised more than $2,000 over the Internet.

Stribling said conference organizers 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 Stribling billed as a "randomly generated talk." So far, they have raised more than $2,000 over the Internet.

Nice touch.

This doesn't really surprise me. Typically, material reviewed for conferences doesn't go through a "proper" reviewing process. What usually happens is one person is in charge of "reviewing" over 100 posters/papers/presentations and, not surprisingly, does not go through each with a fine-toothed comb.

 

On the other hand, articles submitted to a peer-reviewed journal typically involve reviews from 2-4 experts in that field, with an associate editor making the final decision based on the reviews. This process usually takes about two months.

It's not a good sign in any profession when it takes a "fine-toothed comb" to separate work from pure garbage. But yeah, I still like the Social Text trick better.

It's not a good sign in any profession when it takes a "fine-toothed comb" to separate work from pure garbage.

 

I don't even know why people present "papers" at conferences... none of the chairs have time to thoroughly review them. They typically assume that the first author received approval from his/her PI. It's an honors system of sorts.

 

Also keep in mind that presentations at conferences typically mean significantly less than work published in peer-reviewed journals.

I don't even know why people present "papers" at conferences... none of the chairs have time to thoroughly review them.  They typically assume that the first author received approval from his/her PI.  It's an honors system of sorts. 

 

Also keep in mind that presentations at conferences typically mean significantly less than work published in peer-reviewed journals.

Still, the distinction is "thoroughly" -- it doesn't seem to be asking too much that an expert (reading merely the abstract) realize that a random sequence of phrases doesn't make sense. It wouldn't be funny if a paper with deep, obvious errors gets into a conference, because the abstract could be interesting and convincing. But it is funny when gobbledygook is accepted.

Still, the distinction is "thoroughly" -- it doesn't seem to be asking too much that an expert (reading merely the abstract) realize that a random sequence of phrases doesn't make sense.  It wouldn't be funny if a paper with deep, obvious errors gets into a conference, because the abstract could be interesting and convincing.  But it is funny when gobbledygook is accepted.

 

I agree that the chair should've done a better job reviewing the paper but, as I said before, there's more of an honors system in place than a true reviewing process (because, frankly, nobody has the time to review the large volume of material that's submitted for presentation). In addition, scientific conferences aren't formums for complete, peer-reviewed work to be showcased. They're more of an opportunity for people to bounce ideas off one another's heads and learn more about work outside of their immediate areas of experitise... and, of course, socialize. It's a relatively informal setting. Work that doesn't make it into proper peer-reviewed journals doesn't mean diddley-poo to the scientific community.

 

What's kind of sad is that these grad students know all of what I explained above, yet still thought it'd be "funny" to do this. If anything, it makes them look like people of substandard-MIT intellect.