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Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference

entertainment.slashdot.org

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Re: Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference

#3

Post by rtw »

It was actually accepted as a "poster" which is not a rigorous thing. I still think it's an embarrassment. This has been done before, and accepted as a full CS paper (search for "scigen").

The best example is the "Sokal affair" (search for "Alan Sokal") which is awesome because it doesn't just demonstrate sheer negligence with a randomly generated paper: it was carefully crafted to sound like it made sense.

Re: Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference

#6

Post by jackowayed »

people don't like admitting that they don't know something. Especially that they don't know something when they're supposed to be very knowledgeable about it.

But come on! They could have rejected it as "incomprehensible" or "needing to explain what it was talking about better" or "not staying on one topic".

The abstract started talking about the Internet and OOP and ended up talking about digital-to-analog converters and e-commerce.

Just because you're smart and you can't understand it doesn't mean that it's smarter.

Re: Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference

#8

Post by kwamenum86 »

The abstract was craptastic but it is no different from the craptastic abstracts of several human-generated papers.

I think part of the problem is the people expect academic papers to be complicated/cutting edge/forward thinking, and therefore not immediately comprehensible.

Now I have to admit, the first sentence of the abstract sounded really good but it was all downhill from there. Again though, it was downhill in the same way as many other abstracts I have read.

Maybe this means that academics need to stop trying to sound so smart in their papers and just get the point across...or maybe it just exposes one (or several) of the reviewers as utterly incompetent.

Re: Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference

#9

Post by gcv »

So it was post-modern cultural studies first with Alan Sokal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair), then theoretical physics with the Bogdanov brothers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair), and now it's the turn of computer science. As good CS people, the meta-authors of this article used a random generator rather than faking the text themselves. I guess the discipline is growing up. :)
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