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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

#101

Post by light_hue_1 »

tnecniv wrote: post #83
light_hue_1 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true at all. In AI, ML, NLP and Computer Vision, for example, conferences tend to be double blind. In robotics they tend to be single blind. Most people are not putting their work up on arxiv before publication, so you can't find that out either.

Often those double blind conferences contain explicit exceptions that let you post on Arxiv. Check the Call for Papers from this year's NeurIPS for example. Obviously you aren't required to put anything on Arxiv, but lots of people want to stake their territory and will post either a preprint or an incomplete version of the paper (e.g. with an example missing). > In robotics they tend to be single blind. I just wante…

The NeurIPS exemption isn't specific to arxiv: "The existence of non-anonymous preprints (on arXiv, social media, websites, etc.) will not result in rejection" People can post anywhere. Most people don't. I don't check carefully, and as I reviewer I explicitly don't look, but when I do see a preprint it's rarely any different from the submitted version. People do stake out territory, but it's more like they do that with shitty papers that no one wants to accept but they want to "own" some phrase that might be popular in the future. The NLP community is very unhappy about this in particular.

> I just wanted to point out that this does vary a little bit. RSS was double blind this year but ICRA was single blind last I checked.

It has been this way for a few years now. RSS & CoRL are double blind, ICRA and IROS are single-blind. I can't think of the last time I submitted to an ML, AI, NLP, or vision conference that wasn't double blind. It's sort of a strange robotics thing :)

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

#102

Post by saltedonion »

tomato2juice wrote: post #4

Looks like the (sad) background story is here : https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/the-hidden-story-behind-th... Posting here instead of a new submission

Is there a follow up to this story? Did the professor get investigated ?

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

#103

Post by effie »

softwaredoug wrote: post #80
effie wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current U.S./Europe academia seems unable to change from within. It lives on government money which it itself controls and distributes to those who "play ball" - the others are pushed away. The only way a change can happen here if academia-independent people control and distribute money to individuals who showed talent/potential/results in the past. It will take massive outside interference to fix or supplant the cor…

It does seem like there's sometimes too much inside baseball in grant review/awards. I wonder if there needs to be a notion of a 'stakeholder' in research that can measure/advocate for the general market of the research outcomes

Yes, the public should be the main stakeholder if public is funding the project. The problem is, it takes an expert to judge the work of another expert. Wise people outside the local academia should represent the public in such things. Maybe one way is to hire and pay well some foreign professors to do the adversarial oversight/evaluation of our local science workforce. For example, a renowned German scientist hired and payed by French government for 5 years to criticize and oversee funding of French scientists close to his area of expertise. The system has to be more adversarial to weed out/defund the bad activities.

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

#104

Post by momofarm »

jeffbee wrote: 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?

For some reason, Chinese industry field has some enthusiastic on computer vision and IoT field, but to me those things are worthless junk.

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

#105

Post by tnecniv »

BurningFrog wrote: post #54
yutopia wrote: post #27

Academia has become tremendously cutthroat but it still operates under the assumption that everyone acts honorably. Perhaps that’s no longer sustainable, but what is the solution? Many of the problems with modern-day academic research can be traced back to increased scale and competition, neither of which is going away.

Seems like Peer Review is hopelessly broken. Conflicts of interest galore. Science did fine without it until ~40 years ago, and it can do so again. I hope.

Peer review is much older than that. It dates back to the 18th century.

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

#106

Post by neilv »

mcguire wrote: post #73
tomato2juice wrote: post #4

Looks like the (sad) background story is here : https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/the-hidden-story-behind-th... Posting here instead of a new submission

Holy crap! Those allegations are bad, but the student's suicide makes it much worse.

It's all tragic. If anyone ever finds themselves in a situation like Huixiang Chen, you have integrity that the world needs more of, don't despair. I suggest that your first order of business might be to find trustworthy people who can give give good advice, in confidence. Ideally, you'll eventually find someone with clout, who can take over fixing the problems, but the maybe first is to simply get good advice from trustworthy people. In parallel, go talk with a mental health counselor about how you're feeling, since feeling depressed and initially not being able to imagine any good outcome is normal.

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

#107

Post by SoylentOrange »

lazyjeff wrote: post #32
withinrafael wrote: post #11

The paper file listing [1] from the PC in question shows predictable [conference][year]-paper[incrementing-number] file name pattern. Rather than "insider help" [2], could this be explained via a "leaky endpoint/api" that got scraped? I hope I'm missing something. [1] https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*sNC6SuC1v8peYmw6KEcz3g.pn... [2] Quote: "HotCRP does not show you your own submission even if you are a PC member, s…

It's possible, but there are only a few reviewing systems that are commonly used and their permission systems are robust as far as I know. I think a simpler explanation is that someone in the fraud group has a "higher permission role" than a first-line reviewer, so has access to these. This could be someone who is a general chair, program committee chair, track chair or area chair if the conference is big enough, and…

It has been confirmed that the reviewing system in question is HotCRP, which is a very battle-tested system that is unlikely to have these issues.

There is a comment from Eddie Kohler on Twitter which implies this was not a leaky endpoint problem. You can see this thread for more details: https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222659612857401344?s=20

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

#109

Post by tnecniv »

I want to point out that, as far as I can tell, the advisor is still active at the university [1] and even presented the questionable paper at the conference [2]. This is pretty disturbing and I haven't found any more info on what the school has done outside some vague internal investigation [3]. Does anybody know if the university is actually conducting a thorough investigation and whether or not it's ongoing?

As a PhD student, this is disgusts me. I've witnessed my share of awful, exploitative lab situations but this takes the cake. It seems to me that most of the time, professors only receive soft punishments (e.g. people in the department warning prospective students to think twice about joining a lab) unless the incident draws enough bad press.

[1] http://www.taoli.ece.ufl.edu/

[2] https://twitter.com/VHuixiang/status/1146524212279955458

[3] https://bit.ly/2UsrMsa

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

#110

Post by loeg »

ISL wrote: post #75
ridv wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how people are protesting the structural policing systems in the US in part because the systems seem like they're built to protect police instead of holding them accountable? It's been my experience that tenure provides something similar in academia. As a lowly grad student, even in the most outrageous of cases, you aren't likely to succeed in bringing these issues to light. It would take tremendous determin…

There is an option C): Switch advisors. As long as the department is sympathetic to the student's complaint, it will accommodate the switch if it can. Furthermore, there is increasing attention to providing "Faculty Mentors" -- people of faculty rank who are emphatically not the student's advisor, tasked in that capacity with advocating for the student's needs alone. Look within the University for other outlets for y…

Or D), blow the whistle and get out of academia.
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