61–70 of 93 posts
>Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right? No, absolutely not. Looking at the web site immediately raises two red flags: 1) It's a multi-topic conference. Usually these fall into two categories: Undergrad conferences and money-making scams. Participating in neither of them is "a big achievement" 2) The submission d…
>Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right? No, absolutely not. Looking at the web site immediately raises two red flags: 1) It's a multi-topic conference. Usually these fall into two categories: Undergrad conferences and money-making scams. Participating in neither of them is "a big achievement" 2) The submission d…
Original author here. The two things you pointed out were exactly the two things that first caused me to get suspicious of this conference. However, as notthetup points out, there are lots of people in the Indian education system who don't know this. And the statement I made: Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, righ…
I don't know how conferences work but isn't it the purpose of a conference to discuss a certain paper? Aren't sessions planned in which a paper is taken and dissected? I can very well imagine that papers like this would be quickly discovered and discredited. Sure, it may not happen before the conference starts but at some point either before or after everybody sits down to discuss the paper it should be glaringly obv…
No. The purpose of a conference [1] is to have researchers present their results. The timing guidelines for a typical conference talk would look like: 15 minutes for the talk, 5 minutes for questions and comments, and 5 minutes for setting up the next talk. As you can imagine, this doesn't give much time for discussions; dissecting a paper is not part of the agenda. The questions and comments raised in the 5-minute period after the talk usually are along the lines of "Do you think your approach will work for this other problem?", rather than "Can you explain how this step in the argument works?". If you have a question of the latter kind, then you are supposed to discuss it with the author offline, so that the conference schedule is not affected. The conference does not provide you with a forum to discuss papers at any depth.
[1] All of this pertains to Theoretical Computer Science conferences; I suspect conferences in other fields are similar, but I don't know for sure.
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Good point. I have that point buried way down in the post. Need to give it prominence somewhere in the beginning.
This is definitely important, since I had the same impression and was a bit suprised how you could be that angry about a single conference. Btw, is it also a requirement for students in India to send out a specific number of applications? I get a lot of phd position applications from indian students as response to my publications. They look like mass emails and are usually absolutely unrelated to the field.
The PhD applications problem is a different issue. We're churning out a million engineers every year, and a good fraction of them are convinced that getting into a Masters/PhD program in the US is the gateway to riches and a better life. A few of these students are smart enough to know where to apply and how to apply, but most of them are clueless enough to actually spam any faculty email addresses they can find from any US university. And yes, they're mass emails, in the sense that they send out these mails to 10s of people without bothering to customize them.
The important thing to remember is that India is a vast and varied country. We have the worst students, but we also have the best students - so don't completely ignore all emails from all Indian sounding names; one of them might just be from the next superstar at your school :-)
Reminds me of when Alan Sokal wrote a paper full of buzzwords and co-opted scientific language and name-dropping then submitted it to a prestigious cultural studies journal [1]. Thesis: quantum gravity is merely a social and linguistic construct. Accepted. The humanities are still trying to recover from that one. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
The randomly generated talks here are just as hilarious: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#talks But the sad thing is, you could probably show stuff like this on a TV series as a "this is what research produces" and the majority of people wouldn't know any better.
It's not unlike what we have in France with the Bogdanov brothers [1]. They are pretty much scientific impostors but they are still quite popular and sell a lot of unintelligible books.
I don't blame people for being duped. But rather the medias and journalists that put them in the spotlight instead of competent and honest scientists.
The education system in India is unimaginably worse. 57 out 60 students who completed Btech IT(aka Software Engineering) in my batch didn't knew even to a write a program to check if a number is palindrome or not.
I've seen worse. I had opted for a micro controller elective in a semester. We were only 6 guys in the whole class who did that. I discovered I was pretty good in Assembly language programming(8085) so it made more sense to study and work on that further. The remain class opted for C++, on the day of the exam I was chatting with a girl as to well she had prepared. She tells she had prepared everything apart from clas…
Even the good quality conferences send out batches of papers to be reviewed and then the reviewers forward them to their students and colleagues without properly checking the feedback before passing them back to the section chairs. Just be thankful that you didn't have a good quality paper rejected due to a bad review by a tired PhD student who didn't have enough experience in the field to be a reviewer.
The OP blames the education system for putting pressure on students to publish. The problem is more like not teaching the students how to find a reputable path to publication and not weighing the quality of the venue.
He/she should also be complaining to iraj.in for hosting the dodgy conference website and lending credibility to it.
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No, it's not. As an academic myself, we get spam emails advertising conferences just like this. It is not an achievement (of any sort), and what you're doing poorly represents both the academic system, and yourself.
I am not sure I understand what you're saying. I know that getting a paper in a conference like this is not an achievement. However, I know lots of students who do not know this. I know faculty in Engineering colleges who do not know this. I know many people who actually pay money to get published in such conferences because they really believe it's an achievement. Hence, this expose to improve awareness. I am not su…
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No, it's not. As an academic myself, we get spam emails advertising conferences just like this. It is not an achievement (of any sort), and what you're doing poorly represents both the academic system, and yourself.
I am not sure I understand what you're saying. I know that getting a paper in a conference like this is not an achievement. However, I know lots of students who do not know this. I know faculty in Engineering colleges who do not know this. I know many people who actually pay money to get published in such conferences because they really believe it's an achievement. Hence, this expose to improve awareness. I am not su…
You should never submit any work to a conference or journal you do not know and follow beforehand.
To be more explicit: a good rule of thumb is that if you are not familiar with the publications of at least some of the committee or, if you were asked to suggest reviewers for you research out of the scientific committee members, you'd be hard pressed to name a few, you should not submit anything.
Your students should know that. If none explained something similar to the above, then you should have.
As you get older, I find I only follow 1-2 quality publications. I often get invited to dubious / shady conferences and I just hit the spam button. All of my peers do the same.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The randomly generated talks here are just as hilarious: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#talks But the sad thing is, you could probably show stuff like this on a TV series as a "this is what research produces" and the majority of people wouldn't know any better.
Reminds of Reggie Watt's "unpredictably brilliant" parody of a Ted Talk. [Skip to 0:54 for English] http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_...
The transition itself was pretty brilliant.