[MACEP] MIT

[Mike Cullum]

As long as we are on MIT, I got a kick out of the article in the paper today
about a couple of MIT grad students who got a paper selected to present at a
conference that was completely composed by a computer out of nonsense
phrases.  Read on.....


 'All Greek' tech babble fools academics

By Greg Frost

Cambridge - 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 programme 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 between July 10 and 13 in Orlando, Florida.

The text of the paper was nonsensical
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 emails that solicit admissions
to the conference.

'Bogus papers shouldn't be included in the conference'
"We were tired of the spam," Stribling said 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," Callaos wrote in an email. "The
author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility of the content of
their paper."

However, Callaos said conference organisers were reviewing their acceptance
procedures in light of the hoax.

Asked whether he would disinvite the MIT students, Callos replied: "Bogus
papers should not be included in the conference programme."

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 Stribling billed as a "randomly generated talk". So
far, they have raised more than $2 000 (about R13 000) over the Internet.

Reuters

Published on the Web by IOL on 2005-04-15 07:02:15


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Mike Cullum
Director of Infrastructure and Instructional Technologies
Northshore School District
3330 Monte Villa Parkway
Bothell, WA 98021-7215

Telephone:  (425)489-6322  Fax:(425)489-6317
Email: mcullum at nsd.org
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