Monday, April 25, 2005
Academic fraud?
Having made the rounds of some prominent blogs, the email circuit, and many prominent news sites, the story of SCIgen, "An Automatic CS Paper Generator", is now all too familiar. In case you came in late, the linked MIT website gives you all the basics and a Google search will point you to more news stories than I feel like linking to from this blog. The executive summary is that one former Venezuelan professor Nagib Callaos, who is notorious in the CS research community for continually spamming people requesting submissions to some conferences of questionable merit that he runs, was devilishly duped by three MIT grad students who managed to get ten pages of computer-generated technobabbly gibberish accepted to the "conference" that calls itself WMSCI 2005.
Most interesting to me, however, are various professional computer scientists' take on this sorry incident and on its reportage in the popular media. There seems to be agreement among us that the whole affair is unfortunate. Exactly who is most guilty, and by how much, seems to divide us, though. Is it
Most interesting to me, however, are various professional computer scientists' take on this sorry incident and on its reportage in the popular media. There seems to be agreement among us that the whole affair is unfortunate. Exactly who is most guilty, and by how much, seems to divide us, though. Is it
- Callaos, who started this whole nasty business in the first place?
- the MIT students, who are guilty of somewhat questionable practices (this blog goes as far as to accuse them of a kind of academic fraud)?
- a c.v.-inflation-enouraging academic culture that allowed a thing like WMSCI to grow?
- the popular media, who have chosen to cast CS conferences in general (and sometimes even the academic world in even-more-general) in an unduly negative light, based on what is after all an isolated incident at a conference that no one in the CS community took seriously?
