271–280 of 332 posts
I am very curious to hear who approved wasting the time of Linux kernel developers, many of whom are volunteers, with this excuse for academic research.
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gregkh sent a 190 patch series to revert all of the "easy" UMN reverts, pending review. People are now looking at the patches and saying things like, "that's one OK, don't revert". There are another 68 commits which did not revert cleanly, in some cases because they were later fixed up, already reverted, or some other patch has touched those lines of code. This will require further manual work. We basically at this p…
Temporarily banning UMN until they can get their IRB act together makes sense, but wholesale reverting every commit ever made by a UMN e-mail address -- whether affiliated with this research or not -- seems kind of extreme? I'm not sure how many people here understand this, but the University of Minnesota is quite large, over 50,000 people. That's comparable to the entire population of Palo Alto and is larger than MI…
And we didn't take any action until another series of suspicious patches started getting sent for review from a graduate student from the same group. At which point, we have a unrepentant professor who has gotten rewarded by a paper at IEEE S&P, and being invited to serve on the PC of the IEEE S&P next year, and an apparently apathetic, toothless IRB at UMN. I can see people criticizing us if we hadn't taken action.
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We know that they approved the research.
I think it’s more accurate to say that “we know that they approved something . Whether or not that something turns out to be exactly that this professor and his student did here is I gather a different question.
What triggered the ban now is another set of suspicious commits was sent by a graduate student in the same research group.
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I beg your pardon; i do not insinuate anything on your part: I agree with you. Investigate this and see if there's been any wrongdoing or just honest mistakes and correct those that were made... at the professional, academic level; that certainly seems proper. I am snarking about the apparent disconnect between the previous suspect activities that have apparently not yet resulted in that kind of oversight thus requir…
Thank you for clarifying. I agree that the researchers' initial response was comically out-of-touch, and can now see the perspective where your snark satirises their statements (deservedly so). I apologize for my aggressive tone, perhaps I should take my own advice and be more inquisitive at first when replying to someone. :) I think the best version of my previous reply would have been something like: "It seems like…
I have investigated, as far as I feel I need to cast judgment. I'm just some hick on a hill in the woods. My censure amounts to a ghosted bit of snark.
If the people who employ these folks make snarky comments about them, that's no more meaningful. If they choose to examine the actual evidence of the behavior at issue here, they might find it upsetting as i do... or hell i dunno there's many reasons they might not. I can't imagine what explanation there might be for this behavior but i'll allow there might be one even I could agree with...
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I'm not able to give them the benefit of the doubt; or at least, if they are so inept they should be rejected by the scientific community. Imagine this: "After thorough research, we discovered that we were able to cause the deaths of numerous individuals by knowingly constructing an unsafe bridge and having it pass municipal inspection." That's the level of unethical research that the U of Mn approved.
The department leadership never approved the research. Why does no one seem to understand that universities don't work like corporations? You never have to get your research ideas approved up the chain of command. You just start working on them (after running them by an IRB if you think that's necessary).
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Yeah and that's some heavy shade on a university. They'll lose good students if this is not fixed.
>They'll lose good students if this is not fixed. "Ability to commit to the Linux kernel with my school email" isn't likely to be a major issue for many. It's a non-issue for undergrad work, and even most grad students are unlikely to be affected. Other than this research, only one other person associated with UMN has committed code to the kernel. This impacts any direct school-sponsored research work, but if some ra…
Eh, I work at a uni. This came from a dept head. The university is taking it seriously?? Doubt it. Now, when a Dean puts up a webpage... things just got serious.
I found these statements by the associate department head interesting: https://twitter.com/lorenterveen/status/1384955467051454466 > I do work in Social Computing, and this situation is directly analogous to a number of incidents on Wikipedia quite awhile ago that led to that community and researchers reaching an understanding on research methods that are and are not acceptable. and https://twitter.com/lorenterveen/s…
>it's been clear for awhile that IRBs often do not understand the issues and the potential risks/harms of doing research in online communities / social media. Too bad he's not in a position of power to implement that additional review to CS department research.
This is a great statement, they confirm they're aware of the issue, they acknowledge the concerns and they set out their intention to gather the full facts whilst suspending the operation of the research in the meantime. They also acknowledge the systematic way the need to deal with this. I hope their follow up is as thorough but I want to applaud this, it's a good approach.
It is a good statement, and I believe they'll follow through, but it's missing something important that is often missing from otherwise professional communication. The last line is "We will report our findings back to the community as soon as practical." It should be followed by "and we will provide an update in no more than 30 days". Without any explicit time frame, holding them publicly accountable becomes trickier…
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It is a good statement, and I believe they'll follow through, but it's missing something important that is often missing from otherwise professional communication. The last line is "We will report our findings back to the community as soon as practical." It should be followed by "and we will provide an update in no more than 30 days". Without any explicit time frame, holding them publicly accountable becomes trickier…
> At any point they can just say "we're still investigating" until enough time has passed people aren't paying attention any more. They need to act to get the ban rescinded, they can't just ignore this issue away.
I doubt that - in the other thread, someone noted that the last non-hostile kernel contribution from @umn.edu was in 2014. I don't think they are champing at the bit to get legit kernel contributions merged - or at least haven't in the past 7 years. At this point, it is purely a reputation/PR problem with little urgency - the ban is not blocking anyone's work at the university (except for the suspended research project)