I just received not one but two invitations to present at an upcoming conference, or even to organise a special session, should I so desire. The catch? It’s the 2006 edition of the scam conference that accepted a randomly-generated paper in 2005.
So I guess maybe the personal opening and “We are emphasizing the area of Mathematical Methods and Optimization in Problem Solving Systems which is related to your specific area” doesn’t really mean I’m an invited speaker (funnily enough, the second invitation was emphasising a different area: Computing Technologies, which certainly sounds worth emphasising). Also notable is that this particular invitation comes via my old Otago student address, which dates back to the days when I didn’t have a “specific area”.
Problem is, now I’m afraid to mark it as spam — not knowing how gmail is working its magic, I’m worried about punishing other more legitimate calls for submissions. Instead, here’s a little link love: Anthony Lieken describes this WMSCI as a “fake conference”, the authors of the paper generator software call it (WMSCI) a “spamference”. You’re welcome to make up your own minds, although this blog posting might dissuade you: the poster –then an undergraduate, if I read his later stuff correctly– paid $400 registration after having his paper accepted by “a huge conference having something to do with computing”. Wonder if it was worth it?
(Excuse the ugly phrasing in the links, I’m going for a particular poetic effect. I heartily encourage all seven readers of this blog to emulate me.)
4 Comments
hehe, i met Anthony Liekens @ whatthehack.org this year. He is a very nice Belgian guy who gave a talk on How amateurs beat space agencies to pictures of titan. Do you know him or did you just stumble upon his website?
Just came across it while looking for the SciGen page (I misremembered the name of the paper, shame on me ;-). It pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole nasty business though — the sad thing is that despite a reasonable amount of attention, they keep going.
“Ever wondered whether a scientific paper was actually written by a robot? A new program developed by researchers at Indiana University promises to tell you one way or the other. It was actually developed in response to a prank by MIT researchers who generated a paper from random bits of text and got it accepted for a conference.” Btw, you borowed me a book yesterday and the guidelines for making your own beamer are over here.
Heh, automated detection of automatically generated papers. I guess next comes an automated review process, and giving the talk on video to a room full of crash-test dummies?
The beamer project looks fantastic! I doubt we’ll attempt it, but still damn cool.
And I had forgotten the book, thanks ;-)