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Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences

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Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a huge bummer. When I was doing research in physics, I found it easy to get published, even without having a PhD - though it didn't hurt, I think, to be working at a university with a group that had already published in that publication before. With that said, my PIs didn't assist me at all in preparing, submitting, or defending my research, except to inform me of what to prepare for. I was really pleased with…

I am thinking about applying again from the beginning and start Ph.D. all over. Since I am in love with science. And the only reason I left my home country was because I wanted pursue science. (Science is what makes my love beautiful) But I am afraid maybe my next supervisor will be same (let alone if I leave middle way my current supervisor will not give me letter of recommendation).

This part I don't understand. You did get it published, thanks to connections and whatever 'broken' reasons. I'd guess you research in the domain that you want. By all means it helps your progress. So much more reason to accomplish your research, get it done so you feel no guilt about the quality of the result.

This indeed is under your control. The faulty system, may it be, is beyond your power, at least at the present standing.

Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences

#92
post #47

Looking at the screenshots ... "video recognition in future 5G technology". Is that just straight up word salad? It sounds like the industry horseshit I hear in snippets ... "the convergence of machine learning and IoT". Does the phrase "video recognition in future 5G technology" have _any_ meaning whatsoever?

You are missing "cryptomining lidar focus" .. might add more legitimacy.

Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences

#93
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

peer review at CS conferences is normally anonymous and double-blind to reviewers and authors. however, the conference organizers themselves know who the reviewers and authors are, and the conference management websites are set up to avoid assigning reviewers to papers where they have a conflict of interest with the author. this is usually something like: anyone whose email address has the same domain as yours, plus…

In small fields, it's sometimes really not very hard to guess who are the authors, just given the topic and what papers they cite. Even with double blind.

Not even in "small" fields. A lot of the time any new work is just a further development of previous work by the same author. So if you're well read in your field, that "double blind" peer review is not blind at all.

Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences

#95
post #86

Honestly that's how I figured it worked anyway. Popularity contest. Even the less significant confrences seem to just be platforms where "influencers" (Twitter verified personalities in leading roles at popular tech companies with barely any code in their repos) scratch each others back and swap followers. It was always my understanding that confs were a place for networking with other people just for that purpose. M…

I believe the author of this comment is referring to industry conferences. Please note these are very different from peer-reviewed academic conferences.

In CS these academic conferences are held in many different locations, and many (most?) top researchers are not on Twitter.

Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences

#96
post #46

There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets work on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any papers with each other so as to keep out of each other’s conflict lists (to the extent that even if there is collaboration they voluntarily give up authorship on one paper to prevent conflicts on many future papers) is this normal ?

I have reviewed papers for these types of (but not this) conferences. It would be staggeringly abnormal.

For example, people almost never relinquish authorship credit.

Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences

#97
some of us made a big effort to get anyone at the IEEE or ACM to care about this ISCA'19 incident. The initial investigation by Torrellas was run mostly by ISCA insiders with conflicts of interest, and mostly seemed to be a stall tactic. They did eventually open a new investigation.

ISCA'20 should really have been cancelled until this was resolved.

See a timeline of our attempts to get anyone at ACM/IEEE to care: http://pbzcnepu.net/isca/timeline.html

Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to remember how academia works both in terms of jobs and funding. His funding depended on his advisor. His future job prospects in academia and to a large extent outside of academia depended on his advisor. Because of this extreme multi-year power imbalance, and near indentured servitude at the hands of most advisors who are borderline abusive to students, senior authors control the publication process. It's…

> His future job prospects in academia and to a large extent outside of academia depended on his advisor. In academia, you're absolutely right. But outside, sorry, no. I can perfectly understand how a PhD student under an abusive advisor would feel they're trapped. And I'm gonna sound racist, but I've seen the kind of toxicity there is among Chinese researchers in Western universities, and that's probably making this…

It's not so simple. Even when I got industry offers, labs asked my advisor about what he thought and now when my students get industry offers, I'm asked what I think. Sometimes this is formal, sometimes it's informal over lunch asking if a former student is suitable for a job. It depends where you are going and who is in charge, but your advisor and their opinion can matter a lot.

Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences

#99

Collusion and fraud can be easily determined using graphing algorithms. I’m surprised they don’t use that to determine fraud for things like this at the ACM/IEEE.

Can you please explain?

In CS conferences there is generally a small pool of reviewers for a paper in a given sub-area (ex at a conference on systems some people might focus on file systems). These reviewers tend to review each others’ papers since to be a reviewer you also must be an active contributor.

I don’t see how any algorithm might detect this pattern of fraud without taking into account the merit of the papers.

Re: Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences

#100
post #89

Did anyone think this wasn't happening? Science operates as a priesthood more than anything. Universities orginally emerged out of schools for religious instruction, to train Catholic clergy, and I'm not sure how far we have come from there. There is the same two-faced rapprochement between the highest ideals and the lowest behaviours. The high priests just wear jeans instead.

This comment is not very helpful. Many scientists are doing their best to improve the world by publishing their research to the public. They are doing so, at least in CS, at a substantial pay cut compared to industry.

You can see the efficacy of modern science by the real and impactful discoveries in machine learning and related fields made over the last 10-15 years.

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