Re: Conferences in computer science

The general idea is actually not quite new. When I attended a lecture in 
social psychology (many years ago), the teacher told us about a field 
test which consisted of a eloquently written paper without content, 
which the conductors of the field test managed to get published in a 
quite prominent journal ...

... withouth any doubts, the situation became worse in the meantime ...

Pascal.




Alessio Guglielmi wrote:

> At 16:39 +0200 15.4.05, Alessio Guglielmi wrote:
>
> > Hi, Ugo just informed me that a randomly computer generated paper has 
> > been accepted at a computer science conference, so I thought I should 
> > pass this info on: <http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scigen/>. Ciao, -Alessio
>
>
> The main Italian newspaper, "Corriere della Sera", has reported on this 
> today: 
> <http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Scienze_e_Tecnologie/2005/04_Aprile/15/mit.shtml>. 
>
>
> As naturally happens with outsiders, for the reporter the conference is 
> `worldwide known', its promoters are `first-rate scholars', conferences 
> are held in `luxury hotels' and there are `participation gifts'. Imagine 
> how keen the average reader of the article is to finance research.
>
> Obviously, this degeneracy is possible because we slowly lowered our 
> quality standards and pressed for quantity at the expense of quality. In 
> this case, the conference is clearly crap, but what about the recent 
> Montreux one? They asked to write the conference program to the Monty 
> Python, but still attracted some first-rate scientists in the committee 
> and as authors.
>
> In the beginning, I had a doubt that maybe something like Montreux could 
> have its usefulness anyway, but I was wrong: I think we should boycott!
>
> One (excellent) participant told me that 20% of the people there knew 
> about logic, and had interesting scientific exchange and fun talking 
> about the rest 80% of completely clueless people. In a situation like 
> this, you could see the 20% full glass, and say that the event was 
> useful to the people with a clue. I think we should look at the 80% 
> empty glass, and insist that there is a danger of degeneracy that in the 
> end will damage us all.
>
> -Alessio Guevara


--
Dr. Pascal Hitzler
Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, 76128 Karlsruhe
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721 608 6580
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