SCIgen
SCIgen is a program that randomly generates nonsense in the form of computer science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a custom-made context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers.
In 2005, a paper generated by SCIgen, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, was accepted as a "non-reviewed" paper to the 2005 World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics and the authors were invited to speak [1]. The authors of SCIgen described their hoax on their website, and it soon received great publicity when picked up by Slashdot. WMSCI withdrew their invitation, but the SCIgen team went anyway, renting space in the hotel separately from the conference and delivering a series of randomly generated talks on their own "track." The organizer of all these conferences is Professor Nagib Callaos. The WMSCI was also sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers from 2000 until 2005. The IEEE stopped granting sponsorship to Callaos in 2006.
Submitting the paper was a deliberate attempt to embarrass WMSCI, which the authors claim accepts low-quality papers and sends unsolicited requests for submissions in bulk to academics. As the SCIgen website states:
One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check out the very broad conference description on the WMSCI 2005 website).
— About SCIgen [2]
Sample output
Opening abstract of Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy:[3]
Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and public/private key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable.
Other successful works
- The Rooter paper, after machine translation into Russian, has been accepted into a Russian scientific journal. The only drawback the reviewer has noted was “unsatisfactory style”[4][5].
- Mathias Ulsar's paper was accepted to the IPSI-BG conference[6].
- Professor Genco Gülan published a paper in the 3rd International Symposium of Interactive Media Design[7].
- Students at Iran's Sharif University of Technology published a paper in the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation (which is published by Elsevier)[8]. The students wrote under the false, non-Persian surname, MosallahNejad, which translates literally as: "from an Armed Breed". The paper was subsequently removed when the publishers were informed that it was a joke paper[9].
See also
References
- ^ Rob Thomas. "The Dangers of Spamferences" (HTML).
- ^ "SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator". MIT.
- ^ Stribling, Jeremy. "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" (PDF).
Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and public/private key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable.
{{cite web}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ (in Russian) "Четыреста первый способ Остапа Бендера".
- ^ (in Russian) "Корчеватель: алгоритм типичной унификации точек доступа и избыточности". (Google cache)
- ^ "Mathias Ulsar's paper".
- ^ "About Genco Gulan's paper".
- ^ Rohollah Mosallahnezhad. "Cooperative, Compact Algorithms for Randomized Algorithms" (PDF).
- ^ John L. Casti. "REMOVED: Cooperative, compact algorithms for randomized algorithms".