Randomly generated papers accepted by MIT

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: <ian.peter () ianpeter com>
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2005 18:33:49 -0500
To: <dave () farber net>
Subject: Randomly generated papers accepted by MIT

Dave your readers might find this amusing. The paper in question, and the
radmon
scientific paper generator, can be found at
http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scigen/


Ian Peter



Scientific conference falls for gibberish prank

(copied from http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200504/s1345732.htm)

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.

-Reuters





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