16 ms·

Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences

492 points by bmc7505 6y ago

cryptonector 6y ago
Is there a summary of what the fraud was about? Was it about publishing certain researchers' work? EDIT: Thanks, I skimmed too much.
- YetAnotherMatt 6y ago
  > There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets work on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any papers with each other so as to keep out of each other’s conflict lists (to the extent that even if there is collaboration they voluntarily give up authorship on one paper to prevent conflicts on many future papers). They exchange papers before submissions and then either bid or get assigned to review each other’s papers by virtue of having expertise on the topic of the papers. They give high scores to the papers. If a review raises any technical issues in PC discussions, the usual response is something to the effect that despite the issues they still remain positive; or if a review questions the novelty claims, they point to some minor detail deep in the paper and say that they find that detail to be novel even though the paper itself does not elevate that detail to claim novelty. Our process is not set up to combat such collusion. Verbatim from the article.
- deleted 6y ago
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pvarangot 6y ago
This behavior should be particularly unacceptable in computer science journals. One of the main results computer science give to society is creating secure systems to protect and exchange information, and the fact that a double blind peer review system for a conference that basically deals with the construction of safe reliable systems was broken shouldn't be taken lightly.
- rscho 6y ago
  Come see what's happening in medicine and be really appalled...
  - protomyth 6y ago
    I do wonder if medicine can compete with the various conferences in support of social service programs?
tomato2juice 6y ago
Looks like the (sad) background story is here : https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/the-hidden-story-behind-the-suicide-phd-candidate-huixiang-chen-236cd39f79d3 https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/the-hidden-story-behind-th... Posting here instead of a new submission
- codezero 6y ago
  Wow sounds like that was the tip of the iceberg. Super tragic.
  - Topgamer7 6y ago
    If someone behaves like the mentoring professor did, they aren't a mentor, they are a crux bringing you down. Burn their reputation, your life is worth more than their "research". I do understand the pressure this person was feeling, unfortunately they didn't see a way out.
    - ridv 6y ago
      You know how people are protesting the structural policing systems in the US in part because the systems seem like they're built to protect police instead of holding them accountable? It's been my experience that tenure provides something similar in academia. As a lowly grad student, even in the most outrageous of cases, you aren't likely to succeed in bringing these issues to light. It would take tremendous determination and there's a very good chance you will derail your own academic career. In most cases you have two options when you run into something like this as a Ph.D. student: A) Stick it out, get the degree. B) Bail. Unfortunately I don't see folks within the system acknowledging (at least not openly) that the system is broken without extremely tragic events such as this one taking place.
      - ISL 6y ago
        There is an option C): Switch advisors. As long as the department is sympathetic to the student's complaint, it will accommodate the switch if it can. Furthermore, there is increasing attention to providing "Faculty Mentors" -- people of faculty rank who are emphatically not the student's advisor, tasked in that capacity with advocating for the student's needs alone. Look within the University for other outlets for your concern. You're going to be working very closely with your advisor and relying on them for guidance and networking after graduation. If the relationship is toxic and the only options are A or B, think real hard about the upside of B before selecting A.
codezero 6y ago
They seem to summarize it in paragraph four, though I am not clear on what this really means - I think it is that certain authors are able to be "top ranked" and get limited review from colluding peers who may also be co-authors on the paper, but removed themselves to squeeze through review faster and avoid future flags for "conflict of interest" "There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets work on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any papers with each other so as to keep out of each other’s conflict lists (to the extent that even if there is collaboration they voluntarily give up authorship on one paper to prevent conflicts on many future papers). They exchange papers before submissions and then either bid or get assigned to review each other’s papers by virtue of having expertise on the topic of the papers. They give high scores to the papers. If a review raises any technical issues in PC discussions, the usual response is something to the effect that despite the issues they still remain positive; or if a review questions the novelty claims, they point to some minor detail deep in the paper and say that they find that detail to be novel even though the paper itself does not elevate that detail to claim novelty. Our process is not set up to combat such collusion." Also see the link in a sibling comment for what seems to have kicked this all off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460336
- currymj 6y ago
  peer review at CS conferences is normally anonymous and double-blind to reviewers and authors. however, the conference organizers themselves know who the reviewers and authors are, and the conference management websites are set up to avoid assigning reviewers to papers where they have a conflict of interest with the author. this is usually something like: anyone whose email address has the same domain as yours, plus anyone you have coauthored any paper with, both of these going back a few years. If you are ethical you will report any additional conflicts that this doesn't catch. so if a cabal wants to make sure they can positively review each others papers, they have to make sure they don't trip those automated filters. this means they must have been at separate institutions for a while, and must avoid publishing any papers together. then, during the review process, they can "bid on" (put themselves forward as a reviewer for) each other's papers and ensure they give only positive reviews.
jjjjjj__ 6y ago
Fraud? Are you kidding me? I have publication in MICRO with a very famous institution in US. (Top 20). You know how my professor published his paper in MICRO? Relationship! Relationship! Relationship! As a graduate student coming from a third world country, I totally lost my hope on the system when I saw a venue as famous as MICRO, is only based on relationship. Don’t judge me, who can I report it? I am graduate student, means losing my supervisor means losing my visa. I am even posting this via anonymous account (thats how scared I am).
- codezero 6y ago
  That's a huge bummer. When I was doing research in physics, I found it easy to get published, even without having a PhD - though it didn't hurt, I think, to be working at a university with a group that had already published in that publication before. With that said, my PIs didn't assist me at all in preparing, submitting, or defending my research, except to inform me of what to prepare for. I was really pleased with that whole experience because it felt like there were very distinctly not gatekeepers in that field. It could very easily be that there are not really any professional stakes in the field I studied in, so maybe that makes a difference. My team was all researchers, not tenured faculty, and we funded ourselves with government grants. With all that said, it's really helpful to get a different point of view - thanks for sharing this, and sorry for the trouble you experienced, nobody should be put in such an awkward position.
  - jjjjjj__ 6y ago
    I am thinking about applying again from the beginning and start Ph.D. all over. Since I am in love with science. And the only reason I left my home country was because I wanted pursue science. (Science is what makes my love beautiful) But I am afraid maybe my next supervisor will be same (let alone if I leave middle way my current supervisor will not give me letter of recommendation).
    - rscho 6y ago
      You are right to be afraid. Get your PhD. first, then do what you want and try to do honest research if you still feel like it. It's like that in every field, apparently. I've been doing medical research for 10 years and I have yet to meet a honest professor. But with time, I got more independent and while I still have to put up with professoral bullshit I now also can conduct honest and independent projects from time to time.
topspin 6y ago
"Conclusion: 99.99% of us are honest but the dishonest 0.01% can cause serious, repeated damage." Precisely how is this ratio determined? Given the unreproducable results and plagiarism that we've learned about in recent times I believe there is a lot more fraud than can be accounted for by "the dishonest 0.01%."
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I think the same. I mean, it's widely known that academic incentives are completely broken all across the board. And yet somehow those broken incentives are not producing dishonest research at scale? Doesn't add up, really.
- bena 6y ago
  You start by thinking: "I feel as if I'm being honest and my intentions are pure, so for the sake of being able to continue doing this, I need to believe that the vast majority are also honest with pure intentions, but I do recognize just how messed up it is and how very easy it would be to abuse." Then you pick numbers that justify your position. Then you get your friends to vouch for your numbers that they helped you come to even though they can't admit that because then they can't independently vouch for them.
- effie 6y ago
  Maybe the absolutely worst are the 0.01% (or more likely, 1%). But the problem is more broad. There are different ways of corruption, making up word salads and fake results on one hand, or engaging in low effort repetitions with little to no questioning of the prevalent methodologies/theories of du jour, to fixing language in grant proposals/reports to get more money. When all these add up, I think 0.01% is likely the portion of the completely honest hard-working people in academia.
  - wegs 6y ago
    It's more than 0.01% honest/hard-working people. You have: * Grad students who will never make tenure. * Lifelong adjuncts / post-docs who are staying there because they won't play the game. * Older faculty from a different era. * Etc. It's enough that at this point, I find all research from my alma mater suspect unless I've personally reviewed it or know the PI personally. But there's a pretty large honest portion too.
withinrafael 6y ago
The paper file listing [1] from the PC in question shows predictable [conference][year]-paper[incrementing-number] file name pattern. Rather than "insider help" [2], could this be explained via a "leaky endpoint/api" that got scraped? I hope I'm missing something. [1] https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*sNC6SuC1v8peYmw6KEcz3g.png https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*sNC6SuC1v8peYmw6KEcz3g.pn... [2] Quote: "HotCRP does not show you your own submission even if you are a PC member, so how did the de-anonymized reviews and PC comments for Huixiang’s paper end up in his laptop? An insider help seems likely."
- lazyjeff 6y ago
  It's possible, but there are only a few reviewing systems that are commonly used and their permission systems are robust as far as I know. I think a simpler explanation is that someone in the fraud group has a "higher permission role" than a first-line reviewer, so has access to these. This could be someone who is a general chair, program committee chair, track chair or area chair if the conference is big enough, and often even senior PC members (the metareviewers). All they have to do is perform an export and put it on Dropbox or Google Drive.
  - SoylentOrange 6y ago
    It has been confirmed that the reviewing system in question is HotCRP, which is a very battle-tested system that is unlikely to have these issues. There is a comment from Eddie Kohler on Twitter which implies this was not a leaky endpoint problem. You can see this thread for more details: https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222659612857401344?s=20 https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222659612857401344?s=20
Upvoter33 6y ago
This is really sad for a great community like SIGARCH. They need to clean up; rather, they are sweeping things under the rug. Let's hope other communities can learn from their mistakes.
- wegs 6y ago
  This is the tip of the iceberg for SIGARCH.
rshnotsecure 6y ago
This was a long time coming. A quick look at the historical DNS records for IEEE.org shows there have been strange things going on for some time. Recently, OpenSSL unveiled a new "notification" policy that gave massive preference to Huawei and Smartisans [1]. They are OpenSSL's largest donors. The process by how this was done was kind of laughably deceptive, which of course aroused further suspicion. Many things have yet to be revealed likely. I hope more individuals come forward. [1] - https://blog.12security.com/openssl-expands-partnership-with-huawei/ https://blog.12security.com/openssl-expands-partnership-with...
- deleted 6y ago
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- pphysch 6y ago
  Please keep the sinophobia out of HN. Thanks.
  - augustt 6y ago
    Nothing wrong with distrust of the CCP and their companies.
  - indemnity 6y ago
    How is questioning the motives of departments of the CCP like Huawei and any other Chinese company Sinophobic? Do you realise we have relatively strong crypto today due to lobbying and pressure on the US government in the 90s, who wanted to keep crypto weak. Why on earth should we not question when China adopts the same tactics via direct or indirect methods?
    - yorwba 6y ago
      > How is questioning the motives of departments of the CCP like Huawei and any other Chinese company Sinophobic? Well, if you think that all Chinese companies are departments of the CCP and, by extension, all Chinese nationals working for Chinese companies (so the vast majority) are working for the CCP, and a Chinese company sponsoring OpenSSL wants to keep crypto weak... how is that anything but Sinophobia? Maybe you think it's justified Sinophobia because of how evil the CCP is... but most evil things the CCP did can be summarized as "they oppress their people" and they oppress their people because they don't have majority support. That's especially true in internationally operating tech companies, where the employees are the most likely to need access to banned foreign websites just to do their job. Most Chinese people don't work for the CCP, they work around them.
obvthrowaway2 6y ago
I have always imagined higher level academia would be rife with inner circle politics (corruption).
- winstonschmidt 6y ago
  "higher level X would be rife with inner circle politics" - sadly seems to be in line with human nature. FWIW, anecdotally, in my interactions with academia involved parties have mostly been surprisingly respectable - which is more that I can say for industry.
yutopia 6y ago
Academia has become tremendously cutthroat but it still operates under the assumption that everyone acts honorably. Perhaps that’s no longer sustainable, but what is the solution? Many of the problems with modern-day academic research can be traced back to increased scale and competition, neither of which is going away.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  Seems like Peer Review is hopelessly broken. Conflicts of interest galore. Science did fine without it until ~40 years ago, and it can do so again. I hope.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    The solution is still within peer review, I feel. What ethical alternative is there? Required reproduction of the result could be a step forward, but only for cheap research.
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      I don't think science was unethical before Peer Review. As I understand it, modern peer review came about as a 'crowd sourcing" solution to the hugely expanding number of articles to publish, in ever more specialized fields. The journals couldn't keep enough relevant expertise around, so letting the scientists review each other was the simple fix.
      - throwawayiionqz 6y ago
        This does not make sense. Before scientists started reviewing each other, who at the journal was judging the work of scientists to be published? Scientists?
        BurningFrog 6y ago
        Well, science literate people working at the journal, I assume. The point is that they did not have a conflict of interest. In 2020 peer review, people are often asked to review the work of their rivals. So they're incentivized to (1) say that it's bad and demand many changes, and/or (2) steal their ideas.
DenisM 6y ago
Certain news and social media sites have expertise in detecting voting rings. Maybe they could help...
kleiba 6y ago
In a time when the main purpose of a conference were academic exchange and moving forward a scientific field, there was little incentive to engage in fraud. When, as is standard practice today, your scientific career hinges on how many papers you published at top venues, the story changes drastically. Accounts of how groups of inter-connected high-profile researchers game the review system for their own advantage are deeply concerning.
jedberg 6y ago
The bigger question is, what do we do about it? It's inevitable that when you do research on a very niche topic, you'll probably know a lot of people who are qualified to review your paper. How do we prevent this kind of corruption when the communities are so small?
p0llard 6y ago
Does anyone know which other SIG is implicated? Or where I might be able to find out?
znpy 6y ago
There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets work on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any papers with each other so as to keep out of each other’s conflict lists (to the extent that even if there is collaboration they voluntarily give up authorship on one paper to prevent conflicts on many future papers) is this normal ?
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Well, no, that's why this publication is a strong assertion of unacceptable fraud.
- SoylentOrange 6y ago
  I have reviewed papers for these types of (but not this) conferences. It would be staggeringly abnormal. For example, people almost never relinquish authorship credit.
- frozenport 6y ago
  In small fields you know most players which has a similar effect.
jeffbee 6y ago
Looking at the screenshots ... "video recognition in future 5G technology". Is that just straight up word salad? It sounds like the industry horseshit I hear in snippets ... "the convergence of machine learning and IoT". Does the phrase "video recognition in future 5G technology" have _any_ meaning whatsoever?
- mindfulplay 6y ago
  You are missing "cryptomining lidar focus" .. might add more legitimacy.
- grafs50 6y ago
  I'd imagine it was about object recognition in videos transmitted over a 5G network.
- mucle6 6y ago
  I imagine it means "live" over 5G
- momofarm 6y ago
  For some reason, Chinese industry field has some enthusiastic on computer vision and IoT field, but to me those things are worthless junk.
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mcguire 6y ago
"Here is what I heard from an award-winning professor about what happened. The professor has first-hand knowledge of the investigations and has communicated directly with the investigators, but wishes to remain anonymous:" If no one is going to publish names, nothing is going to happen. I've seen fraud at IEEE ICDCS '98, but that conference was a mess, and smaller IEEE regional conferences are sewers, but nothing especially improper.
jasonhansel 6y ago
Read the alleged response by Tao Li to the original accusations against him: https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/help-dr-tao-li-is-threatening-insiders-on-behalf-of-university-of-florida-3fa1cb16de68 https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/help-dr-tao-li-is-threaten... This is a really shocking threat: he's saying that his school (the University of Florida) will take legal action against people making good-faith allegations of academic misconduct against him, because they have unspecified "ulterior motives." How is this attempt to silence people an appropriate response to the death of one of his own postdocs? At the very least, the University needs to say whether it finds these threats acceptable and whether it is actually considering legal action.
- angry_octet 6y ago
  That is completely believable actually. Legal threats are very effective at silencing whistle blower reports. The response in these cases is that the faculty (head of the research group and the Dean) suffer reputational damage equivalent to the misconduct penalty of the offender. That is, exclusion from research (including supervision, presenting at conferences), retraction of their publications, demotion or termination. Without this, the old boys network will have its way.
- wegs 6y ago
  I can say, from first-hand knowledge, that this is not uncommon. MIT will do this and more against whistleblowers. Most people back down very fast.
zelon88 6y ago
Honestly that's how I figured it worked anyway. Popularity contest. Even the less significant confrences seem to just be platforms where "influencers" (Twitter verified personalities in leading roles at popular tech companies with barely any code in their repos) scratch each others back and swap followers. It was always my understanding that confs were a place for networking with other people just for that purpose. Maybe it's because I'm on the East Coast and all the serious confs are on the west coast.
- SoylentOrange 6y ago
  I believe the author of this comment is referring to industry conferences. Please note these are very different from peer-reviewed academic conferences. In CS these academic conferences are held in many different locations, and many (most?) top researchers are not on Twitter.
Gatsky 6y ago
Did anyone think this wasn't happening? Science operates as a priesthood more than anything. Universities orginally emerged out of schools for religious instruction, to train Catholic clergy, and I'm not sure how far we have come from there. There is the same two-faced rapprochement between the highest ideals and the lowest behaviours. The high priests just wear jeans instead.
- SoylentOrange 6y ago
  This comment is not very helpful. Many scientists are doing their best to improve the world by publishing their research to the public. They are doing so, at least in CS, at a substantial pay cut compared to industry. You can see the efficacy of modern science by the real and impactful discoveries in machine learning and related fields made over the last 10-15 years.
  - Gatsky 6y ago
    You misunderstand. I am definitely not anti-science. The point is we would probably be much further ahead and have many more impactful discoveries if this sort of nonsense wasn't happening, and good people who want to improve the world were given the maximum opportunity to do this. Instead these people are constantly exploited by sociopathic careerists who manage to rise to the top in many places.
  - wegs 6y ago
    It's like police. Good ones do good, and bad ones do harm. You'd expect the good ones to be pro-reform, but there apparently isn't enough pro-reform in academia to have reform. With that, less and less good will happen, and more and more harm.
    - SoylentOrange 6y ago
      There’s a lot of room for improvement: - grad student stipends are negligently low, making it difficult for students to complete their PhDs. - many journals in CS are not open access despite the authors and reviewers not being compensated for their time. I think pre-print servers and the ability to publish work on your own website has really improved the state of CS research over the past 5 years. In the past, the official policies of many top conferences stated that a paper would not appear in the proceedings if it had been published to your website or a pre-print server. This policy has now been dropped (or is not being enforced) by almost all top CS conferences. - it can be difficult to resolve a conflict with your advisor especially if they have tenure. Tenured professors enjoy significant faculty protection (though maybe not to the same degree as police). Often the most productive avenue for a student in this case is to quietly switch advisors. This can lead to entrenchment of toxic faculty. At my alma mater I can think of a professor who was notorious for having none of their students graduate - they all either left academia or switched advisors It’s certainly an imperfect system and I’m sure folks can point out other flaws in the comments. There is a lot of room for reform in these and other areas. For example the lack of transparency in this case makes the entire academic community look bad for no good reason. However I do think that folks on HN (on average) have an overly negative view of academia, some of which may not be based on an accurate understanding of its good parts. For example peer review, despite its many flaws, turns out to be very valuable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of spurious science has been published in pre-print form and on Medium, only to then be rebutted and rejected by scientific venues with a robust peer-review process.
remote_phone 6y ago
Collusion and fraud can be easily determined using graphing algorithms. I’m surprised they don’t use that to determine fraud for things like this at the ACM/IEEE.
- SoylentOrange 6y ago
  Can you please explain? In CS conferences there is generally a small pool of reviewers for a paper in a given sub-area (ex at a conference on systems some people might focus on file systems). These reviewers tend to review each others’ papers since to be a reviewer you also must be an active contributor. I don’t see how any algorithm might detect this pattern of fraud without taking into account the merit of the papers.
pbzcnepu 6y ago
some of us made a big effort to get anyone at the IEEE or ACM to care about this ISCA'19 incident. The initial investigation by Torrellas was run mostly by ISCA insiders with conflicts of interest, and mostly seemed to be a stall tactic. They did eventually open a new investigation. ISCA'20 should really have been cancelled until this was resolved. See a timeline of our attempts to get anyone at ACM/IEEE to care: http://pbzcnepu.net/isca/timeline.html http://pbzcnepu.net/isca/timeline.html
- throwawayiionqz 6y ago
  I am wondering if the NSF program officers responsible for overseeing the grants should be contacted as they would be in power to make the University and the PIs accountable and/or start their own investigations. They can be easily found in grant webpages, eg https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1900713 https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1900713
  - pbzcnepu 6y ago
    The program officers were contacted, leading to the OIG being notified on 6 December 2019 and supposedly an investigation was openened, but we have not heard anything back since then.
    - obmelvin 6y ago
      I just want to thank you for your actions and ask if you have any advice for career paths to do something about this type of academic bullshit. My GF is currently pursuing a PhD in biochem but very interested in pursuing science policy so that she can do something about all the injustice one witnesses as a graduate student. As someone who received both their B.S. and M.S. at UIUC, I'm honestly disgusted at how various professors and administration have handled certain incidents that my friends have been part of
      - pbzcnepu 6y ago
        there's really not much one can do. In Comp Arch, most of the honest people left the field years ago because they got sick of all this nonsense. Most were happy to let those left behind play their silly peer-review games, but when the student suicide happened it was like a call to action. It is easier to fight things from the outside, as the internal higher-ups have less power to mess up your life. It's interesting you mention UIUC, as traditionally that was the source of a lot of suspect papers. It was a running joke about the "coincidence" of how many people with UIUC connections managed to get papers into ISCA each year.
momofarm 6y ago
For doing research in academic, where are the funding from? It's impossible that government could fund every project in states.
tnecniv 6y ago
I want to point out that, as far as I can tell, the advisor is still active at the university [1] and even presented the questionable paper at the conference [2]. This is pretty disturbing and I haven't found any more info on what the school has done outside some vague internal investigation [3]. Does anybody know if the university is actually conducting a thorough investigation and whether or not it's ongoing? As a PhD student, this is disgusts me. I've witnessed my share of awful, exploitative lab situations but this takes the cake. It seems to me that most of the time, professors only receive soft punishments (e.g. people in the department warning prospective students to think twice about joining a lab) unless the incident draws enough bad press. [1] http://www.taoli.ece.ufl.edu/ http://www.taoli.ece.ufl.edu/ [2] https://twitter.com/VHuixiang/status/1146524212279955458 https://twitter.com/VHuixiang/status/1146524212279955458 [3] https://bit.ly/2UsrMsa https://bit.ly/2UsrMsa
- choppaface 6y ago
  There's also hard evidence of misconduct in the conference review software, which directly contradicts the "investigation" from the conference chairs: https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222671193527861249 https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222671193527861249
- throwgeorge 6y ago
  i'm a phd student at uf (in cs not ece) and from what i can tell nothing has been done to discipline tao. there were mutterings when his student committed suicide but nothing since then.
teddyh 6y ago
A few bad apples spoils the barrel.
sk0v 6y ago
And this is exactly why I turned down a Ph.D. and always thought the community of academia (CS academia in my case) is one big pile of circle-jerk and shitty politics..
shultays 6y ago
This was one of the reasoss for me to drop from graduate and quit my research assistant job. I was working on a paper along with a professor. We sent a paper for review and one of the anonymous feedback from one of the reviewers was something like "these (a couple related papers to our subject) also would make good annotations". My professor said "this person is probably writer of those papers and asks for annotations for a good review". I was quite shocked how casual when he was talking about this
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raincom 6y ago
It is worse in humanities. Many university presses won't dare to publish books on themes that are antithetical to the dominant theories and/or paradigms. Being part of the dominant clique is necessary to publish books there.
soraminazuki 6y ago
Not directly related, but the "sign in to medium.com with Google" dialog on the top right corner with my account name on it is really freaking me out.
- hereisdx 6y ago
  It's an iFrame hosted on Google servers, so medium does not directly have access to the iFrame contents. But it is still irritating.
  - soraminazuki 6y ago
    It's the other way around that I'm concerned with; Google tracking which Medium posts I read.
softwaredoug 6y ago
Why don’t we require CS research to be reproducible? It’s a fricken computer program. (or should be!) We also, in machine learning, never truly examine results for basic statistical significance. It’s often rather “I got this number higher”. I struggle to have even basic trust of academic CS results, unless it’s backed by a major private company research (Google research) or academics I know and trust well.
idoeestuff 6y ago
i would like add some discussions. when i say "i", you can either read "i" as i am a pc or external reviewer, or maybe im a grad student. 1. i dont want say anything which gets me trouble, but hotcrp was set up wrong by the chair in that year ISCA. i know pc members were able to download the whole paper submission list. i personally saw _all_ papers and _all_ reviewer comments on anything i did not submit. it is likely that everyone had access to this, because i am not a "big players" in this field. i really doubt i had some special access because i have no relationship to the chair that year. i still have all the papers from isca19. i should not have these, but i just got them from a normal download (no enumeration or guessing urls). 2. point 1 does not excuse leaking, just made easier. instead of calling all pc friends and asking them to call their pc friends, you just need to call one pc friend not on your submission. he could see it. 3. good luck getting tao li. hint: did he fund anyone in the past who was investigating him? did he fund anyone who reviews his papers? 4. the tao li story is deeper. a) there's race issue. because it's easier to manipulate people if your business is being a chinese -> usa faculty pipeline. and once people go through your pipeline, they are even more likely to keep it going! b) if you think the paper push is bad, wait until the details of how he actually treated his students come to life. hint: some things advisors do to students in china is immoral, but tolerated. those things are illegal in usa. 5. this is bigger than tao li. you will never get rid of the cliques, but it's at point that i don't even want read the papers anymore. why sell my integrity for grants, when i could get industry money where at least the product shows the work is not crap? 6. if you want to know some worst players, i heard they are upset they are not in micro2020 reviewer list :p. of course it's not a completely good reviewer list, our community is too small! 7. i hope one day we can honestly talk this out. i would like to tell pressuring stories :)
- dbancajas 6y ago
  > ld years ago because they got sick of all this nonsense. Most were happy to let those left behind play their silly peer-review games, but when the student suicide happened it was like a call to action. > It is easier to fight things from the outside, as the internal higher-ups have less power to me Why don't you start it here? Since you are already anonymous anyways?
Woodi 6y ago
Dear Scientists, I'm very curious - why you stress so much about publishing in that Elseviers, ACMEs and so on ? It's unhealty. First: there are so called "home pages" - instant publication ! I belive every univ have such infrastructure for their stuff, possible students too... Not every paper is ground breaking discovery and not every paper should be published in international and GLOBAL "jurnal". But if you realy insist then: let say USoA with 50 states so at least 50 universities... Then, if you want to publish collect, let say every half of the year, papers (eg. in Tex format) in your department, compile them into YourUniversityDepartmentYearNumber jurnal, print 50 of it, glue stamps and post to 50 libraries. Done. Include cdrom. Also you could do zines. With it's own domain name. Easy. Good content will bring readers. Do not forget about ToC, with urls. But it's not recipe for all diseases you have there. You need to step back and evaluate. Also don't allow yourself to be morphed into asholes and in two generations you will be deans and proffesors. And some environment are just viperies, move out of there !!!

492 points by bmc7505 6y ago

Is there a summary of what the fraud was about? Was it about publishing certain researchers' work? EDIT: Thanks, I skimmed too much.

YetAnotherMatt 6y ago
> There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets work on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any papers with each other so as to keep out of each other’s conflict lists (to the extent that even if there is collaboration they voluntarily give up authorship on one paper to prevent conflicts on many future papers). They exchange papers before submissions and then either bid or get assigned to review each other’s papers by virtue of having expertise on the topic of the papers. They give high scores to the papers. If a review raises any technical issues in PC discussions, the usual response is something to the effect that despite the issues they still remain positive; or if a review questions the novelty claims, they point to some minor detail deep in the paper and say that they find that detail to be novel even though the paper itself does not elevate that detail to claim novelty. Our process is not set up to combat such collusion. Verbatim from the article.
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pvarangot 6y ago

This behavior should be particularly unacceptable in computer science journals. One of the main results computer science give to society is creating secure systems to protect and exchange information, and the fact that a double blind peer review system for a conference that basically deals with the construction of safe reliable systems was broken shouldn't be taken lightly.

rscho 6y ago
Come see what's happening in medicine and be really appalled...
- protomyth 6y ago
  I do wonder if medicine can compete with the various conferences in support of social service programs?

tomato2juice 6y ago

Looks like the (sad) background story is here : https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/the-hidden-story-behind-the-suicide-phd-candidate-huixiang-chen-236cd39f79d3 https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/the-hidden-story-behind-th... Posting here instead of a new submission

codezero 6y ago
Wow sounds like that was the tip of the iceberg. Super tragic.
- Topgamer7 6y ago
  If someone behaves like the mentoring professor did, they aren't a mentor, they are a crux bringing you down. Burn their reputation, your life is worth more than their "research". I do understand the pressure this person was feeling, unfortunately they didn't see a way out.
  - ridv 6y ago
    You know how people are protesting the structural policing systems in the US in part because the systems seem like they're built to protect police instead of holding them accountable? It's been my experience that tenure provides something similar in academia. As a lowly grad student, even in the most outrageous of cases, you aren't likely to succeed in bringing these issues to light. It would take tremendous determination and there's a very good chance you will derail your own academic career. In most cases you have two options when you run into something like this as a Ph.D. student: A) Stick it out, get the degree. B) Bail. Unfortunately I don't see folks within the system acknowledging (at least not openly) that the system is broken without extremely tragic events such as this one taking place.
    - ISL 6y ago
      There is an option C): Switch advisors. As long as the department is sympathetic to the student's complaint, it will accommodate the switch if it can. Furthermore, there is increasing attention to providing "Faculty Mentors" -- people of faculty rank who are emphatically not the student's advisor, tasked in that capacity with advocating for the student's needs alone. Look within the University for other outlets for your concern. You're going to be working very closely with your advisor and relying on them for guidance and networking after graduation. If the relationship is toxic and the only options are A or B, think real hard about the upside of B before selecting A.

codezero 6y ago

They seem to summarize it in paragraph four, though I am not clear on what this really means - I think it is that certain authors are able to be "top ranked" and get limited review from colluding peers who may also be co-authors on the paper, but removed themselves to squeeze through review faster and avoid future flags for "conflict of interest" "There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets work on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any papers with each other so as to keep out of each other’s conflict lists (to the extent that even if there is collaboration they voluntarily give up authorship on one paper to prevent conflicts on many future papers). They exchange papers before submissions and then either bid or get assigned to review each other’s papers by virtue of having expertise on the topic of the papers. They give high scores to the papers. If a review raises any technical issues in PC discussions, the usual response is something to the effect that despite the issues they still remain positive; or if a review questions the novelty claims, they point to some minor detail deep in the paper and say that they find that detail to be novel even though the paper itself does not elevate that detail to claim novelty. Our process is not set up to combat such collusion." Also see the link in a sibling comment for what seems to have kicked this all off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460336

currymj 6y ago
peer review at CS conferences is normally anonymous and double-blind to reviewers and authors. however, the conference organizers themselves know who the reviewers and authors are, and the conference management websites are set up to avoid assigning reviewers to papers where they have a conflict of interest with the author. this is usually something like: anyone whose email address has the same domain as yours, plus anyone you have coauthored any paper with, both of these going back a few years. If you are ethical you will report any additional conflicts that this doesn't catch. so if a cabal wants to make sure they can positively review each others papers, they have to make sure they don't trip those automated filters. this means they must have been at separate institutions for a while, and must avoid publishing any papers together. then, during the review process, they can "bid on" (put themselves forward as a reviewer for) each other's papers and ensure they give only positive reviews.

jjjjjj__ 6y ago

Fraud? Are you kidding me? I have publication in MICRO with a very famous institution in US. (Top 20). You know how my professor published his paper in MICRO? Relationship! Relationship! Relationship! As a graduate student coming from a third world country, I totally lost my hope on the system when I saw a venue as famous as MICRO, is only based on relationship. Don’t judge me, who can I report it? I am graduate student, means losing my supervisor means losing my visa. I am even posting this via anonymous account (thats how scared I am).

codezero 6y ago
That's a huge bummer. When I was doing research in physics, I found it easy to get published, even without having a PhD - though it didn't hurt, I think, to be working at a university with a group that had already published in that publication before. With that said, my PIs didn't assist me at all in preparing, submitting, or defending my research, except to inform me of what to prepare for. I was really pleased with that whole experience because it felt like there were very distinctly not gatekeepers in that field. It could very easily be that there are not really any professional stakes in the field I studied in, so maybe that makes a difference. My team was all researchers, not tenured faculty, and we funded ourselves with government grants. With all that said, it's really helpful to get a different point of view - thanks for sharing this, and sorry for the trouble you experienced, nobody should be put in such an awkward position.
- jjjjjj__ 6y ago
  I am thinking about applying again from the beginning and start Ph.D. all over. Since I am in love with science. And the only reason I left my home country was because I wanted pursue science. (Science is what makes my love beautiful) But I am afraid maybe my next supervisor will be same (let alone if I leave middle way my current supervisor will not give me letter of recommendation).
  - rscho 6y ago
    You are right to be afraid. Get your PhD. first, then do what you want and try to do honest research if you still feel like it. It's like that in every field, apparently. I've been doing medical research for 10 years and I have yet to meet a honest professor. But with time, I got more independent and while I still have to put up with professoral bullshit I now also can conduct honest and independent projects from time to time.

topspin 6y ago

"Conclusion: 99.99% of us are honest but the dishonest 0.01% can cause serious, repeated damage." Precisely how is this ratio determined? Given the unreproducable results and plagiarism that we've learned about in recent times I believe there is a lot more fraud than can be accounted for by "the dishonest 0.01%."

TeMPOraL 6y ago
I think the same. I mean, it's widely known that academic incentives are completely broken all across the board. And yet somehow those broken incentives are not producing dishonest research at scale? Doesn't add up, really.
bena 6y ago
You start by thinking: "I feel as if I'm being honest and my intentions are pure, so for the sake of being able to continue doing this, I need to believe that the vast majority are also honest with pure intentions, but I do recognize just how messed up it is and how very easy it would be to abuse." Then you pick numbers that justify your position. Then you get your friends to vouch for your numbers that they helped you come to even though they can't admit that because then they can't independently vouch for them.
effie 6y ago
Maybe the absolutely worst are the 0.01% (or more likely, 1%). But the problem is more broad. There are different ways of corruption, making up word salads and fake results on one hand, or engaging in low effort repetitions with little to no questioning of the prevalent methodologies/theories of du jour, to fixing language in grant proposals/reports to get more money. When all these add up, I think 0.01% is likely the portion of the completely honest hard-working people in academia.
- wegs 6y ago
  It's more than 0.01% honest/hard-working people. You have: * Grad students who will never make tenure. * Lifelong adjuncts / post-docs who are staying there because they won't play the game. * Older faculty from a different era. * Etc. It's enough that at this point, I find all research from my alma mater suspect unless I've personally reviewed it or know the PI personally. But there's a pretty large honest portion too.

withinrafael 6y ago

The paper file listing [1] from the PC in question shows predictable [conference][year]-paper[incrementing-number] file name pattern. Rather than "insider help" [2], could this be explained via a "leaky endpoint/api" that got scraped? I hope I'm missing something. [1] https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*sNC6SuC1v8peYmw6KEcz3g.png https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*sNC6SuC1v8peYmw6KEcz3g.pn... [2] Quote: "HotCRP does not show you your own submission even if you are a PC member, so how did the de-anonymized reviews and PC comments for Huixiang’s paper end up in his laptop? An insider help seems likely."

lazyjeff 6y ago
It's possible, but there are only a few reviewing systems that are commonly used and their permission systems are robust as far as I know. I think a simpler explanation is that someone in the fraud group has a "higher permission role" than a first-line reviewer, so has access to these. This could be someone who is a general chair, program committee chair, track chair or area chair if the conference is big enough, and often even senior PC members (the metareviewers). All they have to do is perform an export and put it on Dropbox or Google Drive.
- SoylentOrange 6y ago
  It has been confirmed that the reviewing system in question is HotCRP, which is a very battle-tested system that is unlikely to have these issues. There is a comment from Eddie Kohler on Twitter which implies this was not a leaky endpoint problem. You can see this thread for more details: https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222659612857401344?s=20 https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222659612857401344?s=20

Upvoter33 6y ago

This is really sad for a great community like SIGARCH. They need to clean up; rather, they are sweeping things under the rug. Let's hope other communities can learn from their mistakes.

wegs 6y ago
This is the tip of the iceberg for SIGARCH.

rshnotsecure 6y ago

This was a long time coming. A quick look at the historical DNS records for IEEE.org shows there have been strange things going on for some time. Recently, OpenSSL unveiled a new "notification" policy that gave massive preference to Huawei and Smartisans [1]. They are OpenSSL's largest donors. The process by how this was done was kind of laughably deceptive, which of course aroused further suspicion. Many things have yet to be revealed likely. I hope more individuals come forward. [1] - https://blog.12security.com/openssl-expands-partnership-with-huawei/ https://blog.12security.com/openssl-expands-partnership-with...

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pphysch 6y ago
Please keep the sinophobia out of HN. Thanks.
- augustt 6y ago
  Nothing wrong with distrust of the CCP and their companies.
- indemnity 6y ago
  How is questioning the motives of departments of the CCP like Huawei and any other Chinese company Sinophobic? Do you realise we have relatively strong crypto today due to lobbying and pressure on the US government in the 90s, who wanted to keep crypto weak. Why on earth should we not question when China adopts the same tactics via direct or indirect methods?
  - yorwba 6y ago
    > How is questioning the motives of departments of the CCP like Huawei and any other Chinese company Sinophobic? Well, if you think that all Chinese companies are departments of the CCP and, by extension, all Chinese nationals working for Chinese companies (so the vast majority) are working for the CCP, and a Chinese company sponsoring OpenSSL wants to keep crypto weak... how is that anything but Sinophobia? Maybe you think it's justified Sinophobia because of how evil the CCP is... but most evil things the CCP did can be summarized as "they oppress their people" and they oppress their people because they don't have majority support. That's especially true in internationally operating tech companies, where the employees are the most likely to need access to banned foreign websites just to do their job. Most Chinese people don't work for the CCP, they work around them.

obvthrowaway2 6y ago

I have always imagined higher level academia would be rife with inner circle politics (corruption).

winstonschmidt 6y ago
"higher level X would be rife with inner circle politics" - sadly seems to be in line with human nature. FWIW, anecdotally, in my interactions with academia involved parties have mostly been surprisingly respectable - which is more that I can say for industry.

yutopia 6y ago

Academia has become tremendously cutthroat but it still operates under the assumption that everyone acts honorably. Perhaps that’s no longer sustainable, but what is the solution? Many of the problems with modern-day academic research can be traced back to increased scale and competition, neither of which is going away.

BurningFrog 6y ago
Seems like Peer Review is hopelessly broken. Conflicts of interest galore. Science did fine without it until ~40 years ago, and it can do so again. I hope.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  The solution is still within peer review, I feel. What ethical alternative is there? Required reproduction of the result could be a step forward, but only for cheap research.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    I don't think science was unethical before Peer Review. As I understand it, modern peer review came about as a 'crowd sourcing" solution to the hugely expanding number of articles to publish, in ever more specialized fields. The journals couldn't keep enough relevant expertise around, so letting the scientists review each other was the simple fix.
    - throwawayiionqz 6y ago
      This does not make sense. Before scientists started reviewing each other, who at the journal was judging the work of scientists to be published? Scientists?
      - BurningFrog 6y ago
        Well, science literate people working at the journal, I assume. The point is that they did not have a conflict of interest. In 2020 peer review, people are often asked to review the work of their rivals. So they're incentivized to (1) say that it's bad and demand many changes, and/or (2) steal their ideas.

DenisM 6y ago

Certain news and social media sites have expertise in detecting voting rings. Maybe they could help...

kleiba 6y ago

In a time when the main purpose of a conference were academic exchange and moving forward a scientific field, there was little incentive to engage in fraud. When, as is standard practice today, your scientific career hinges on how many papers you published at top venues, the story changes drastically. Accounts of how groups of inter-connected high-profile researchers game the review system for their own advantage are deeply concerning.

jedberg 6y ago

The bigger question is, what do we do about it? It's inevitable that when you do research on a very niche topic, you'll probably know a lot of people who are qualified to review your paper. How do we prevent this kind of corruption when the communities are so small?

p0llard 6y ago

Does anyone know which other SIG is implicated? Or where I might be able to find out?

znpy 6y ago

There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets work on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any papers with each other so as to keep out of each other’s conflict lists (to the extent that even if there is collaboration they voluntarily give up authorship on one paper to prevent conflicts on many future papers) is this normal ?

PeterisP 6y ago
Well, no, that's why this publication is a strong assertion of unacceptable fraud.
SoylentOrange 6y ago
I have reviewed papers for these types of (but not this) conferences. It would be staggeringly abnormal. For example, people almost never relinquish authorship credit.
frozenport 6y ago
In small fields you know most players which has a similar effect.

jeffbee 6y ago

Looking at the screenshots ... "video recognition in future 5G technology". Is that just straight up word salad? It sounds like the industry horseshit I hear in snippets ... "the convergence of machine learning and IoT". Does the phrase "video recognition in future 5G technology" have _any_ meaning whatsoever?

mindfulplay 6y ago
You are missing "cryptomining lidar focus" .. might add more legitimacy.
grafs50 6y ago
I'd imagine it was about object recognition in videos transmitted over a 5G network.
mucle6 6y ago
I imagine it means "live" over 5G
momofarm 6y ago
For some reason, Chinese industry field has some enthusiastic on computer vision and IoT field, but to me those things are worthless junk.

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mcguire 6y ago

"Here is what I heard from an award-winning professor about what happened. The professor has first-hand knowledge of the investigations and has communicated directly with the investigators, but wishes to remain anonymous:" If no one is going to publish names, nothing is going to happen. I've seen fraud at IEEE ICDCS '98, but that conference was a mess, and smaller IEEE regional conferences are sewers, but nothing especially improper.

jasonhansel 6y ago

Read the alleged response by Tao Li to the original accusations against him: https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/help-dr-tao-li-is-threatening-insiders-on-behalf-of-university-of-florida-3fa1cb16de68 https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/help-dr-tao-li-is-threaten... This is a really shocking threat: he's saying that his school (the University of Florida) will take legal action against people making good-faith allegations of academic misconduct against him, because they have unspecified "ulterior motives." How is this attempt to silence people an appropriate response to the death of one of his own postdocs? At the very least, the University needs to say whether it finds these threats acceptable and whether it is actually considering legal action.

angry_octet 6y ago
That is completely believable actually. Legal threats are very effective at silencing whistle blower reports. The response in these cases is that the faculty (head of the research group and the Dean) suffer reputational damage equivalent to the misconduct penalty of the offender. That is, exclusion from research (including supervision, presenting at conferences), retraction of their publications, demotion or termination. Without this, the old boys network will have its way.
wegs 6y ago
I can say, from first-hand knowledge, that this is not uncommon. MIT will do this and more against whistleblowers. Most people back down very fast.

zelon88 6y ago

Honestly that's how I figured it worked anyway. Popularity contest. Even the less significant confrences seem to just be platforms where "influencers" (Twitter verified personalities in leading roles at popular tech companies with barely any code in their repos) scratch each others back and swap followers. It was always my understanding that confs were a place for networking with other people just for that purpose. Maybe it's because I'm on the East Coast and all the serious confs are on the west coast.

SoylentOrange 6y ago
I believe the author of this comment is referring to industry conferences. Please note these are very different from peer-reviewed academic conferences. In CS these academic conferences are held in many different locations, and many (most?) top researchers are not on Twitter.

Gatsky 6y ago

Did anyone think this wasn't happening? Science operates as a priesthood more than anything. Universities orginally emerged out of schools for religious instruction, to train Catholic clergy, and I'm not sure how far we have come from there. There is the same two-faced rapprochement between the highest ideals and the lowest behaviours. The high priests just wear jeans instead.

SoylentOrange 6y ago
This comment is not very helpful. Many scientists are doing their best to improve the world by publishing their research to the public. They are doing so, at least in CS, at a substantial pay cut compared to industry. You can see the efficacy of modern science by the real and impactful discoveries in machine learning and related fields made over the last 10-15 years.
- Gatsky 6y ago
  You misunderstand. I am definitely not anti-science. The point is we would probably be much further ahead and have many more impactful discoveries if this sort of nonsense wasn't happening, and good people who want to improve the world were given the maximum opportunity to do this. Instead these people are constantly exploited by sociopathic careerists who manage to rise to the top in many places.
- wegs 6y ago
  It's like police. Good ones do good, and bad ones do harm. You'd expect the good ones to be pro-reform, but there apparently isn't enough pro-reform in academia to have reform. With that, less and less good will happen, and more and more harm.
  - SoylentOrange 6y ago
    There’s a lot of room for improvement: - grad student stipends are negligently low, making it difficult for students to complete their PhDs. - many journals in CS are not open access despite the authors and reviewers not being compensated for their time. I think pre-print servers and the ability to publish work on your own website has really improved the state of CS research over the past 5 years. In the past, the official policies of many top conferences stated that a paper would not appear in the proceedings if it had been published to your website or a pre-print server. This policy has now been dropped (or is not being enforced) by almost all top CS conferences. - it can be difficult to resolve a conflict with your advisor especially if they have tenure. Tenured professors enjoy significant faculty protection (though maybe not to the same degree as police). Often the most productive avenue for a student in this case is to quietly switch advisors. This can lead to entrenchment of toxic faculty. At my alma mater I can think of a professor who was notorious for having none of their students graduate - they all either left academia or switched advisors It’s certainly an imperfect system and I’m sure folks can point out other flaws in the comments. There is a lot of room for reform in these and other areas. For example the lack of transparency in this case makes the entire academic community look bad for no good reason. However I do think that folks on HN (on average) have an overly negative view of academia, some of which may not be based on an accurate understanding of its good parts. For example peer review, despite its many flaws, turns out to be very valuable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of spurious science has been published in pre-print form and on Medium, only to then be rebutted and rejected by scientific venues with a robust peer-review process.

remote_phone 6y ago

Collusion and fraud can be easily determined using graphing algorithms. I’m surprised they don’t use that to determine fraud for things like this at the ACM/IEEE.

SoylentOrange 6y ago
Can you please explain? In CS conferences there is generally a small pool of reviewers for a paper in a given sub-area (ex at a conference on systems some people might focus on file systems). These reviewers tend to review each others’ papers since to be a reviewer you also must be an active contributor. I don’t see how any algorithm might detect this pattern of fraud without taking into account the merit of the papers.

pbzcnepu 6y ago

some of us made a big effort to get anyone at the IEEE or ACM to care about this ISCA'19 incident. The initial investigation by Torrellas was run mostly by ISCA insiders with conflicts of interest, and mostly seemed to be a stall tactic. They did eventually open a new investigation. ISCA'20 should really have been cancelled until this was resolved. See a timeline of our attempts to get anyone at ACM/IEEE to care: http://pbzcnepu.net/isca/timeline.html http://pbzcnepu.net/isca/timeline.html

throwawayiionqz 6y ago
I am wondering if the NSF program officers responsible for overseeing the grants should be contacted as they would be in power to make the University and the PIs accountable and/or start their own investigations. They can be easily found in grant webpages, eg https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1900713 https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1900713
- pbzcnepu 6y ago
  The program officers were contacted, leading to the OIG being notified on 6 December 2019 and supposedly an investigation was openened, but we have not heard anything back since then.
  - obmelvin 6y ago
    I just want to thank you for your actions and ask if you have any advice for career paths to do something about this type of academic bullshit. My GF is currently pursuing a PhD in biochem but very interested in pursuing science policy so that she can do something about all the injustice one witnesses as a graduate student. As someone who received both their B.S. and M.S. at UIUC, I'm honestly disgusted at how various professors and administration have handled certain incidents that my friends have been part of
    - pbzcnepu 6y ago
      there's really not much one can do. In Comp Arch, most of the honest people left the field years ago because they got sick of all this nonsense. Most were happy to let those left behind play their silly peer-review games, but when the student suicide happened it was like a call to action. It is easier to fight things from the outside, as the internal higher-ups have less power to mess up your life. It's interesting you mention UIUC, as traditionally that was the source of a lot of suspect papers. It was a running joke about the "coincidence" of how many people with UIUC connections managed to get papers into ISCA each year.

momofarm 6y ago

For doing research in academic, where are the funding from? It's impossible that government could fund every project in states.

tnecniv 6y ago

I want to point out that, as far as I can tell, the advisor is still active at the university [1] and even presented the questionable paper at the conference [2]. This is pretty disturbing and I haven't found any more info on what the school has done outside some vague internal investigation [3]. Does anybody know if the university is actually conducting a thorough investigation and whether or not it's ongoing? As a PhD student, this is disgusts me. I've witnessed my share of awful, exploitative lab situations but this takes the cake. It seems to me that most of the time, professors only receive soft punishments (e.g. people in the department warning prospective students to think twice about joining a lab) unless the incident draws enough bad press. [1] http://www.taoli.ece.ufl.edu/ http://www.taoli.ece.ufl.edu/ [2] https://twitter.com/VHuixiang/status/1146524212279955458 https://twitter.com/VHuixiang/status/1146524212279955458 [3] https://bit.ly/2UsrMsa https://bit.ly/2UsrMsa

choppaface 6y ago
There's also hard evidence of misconduct in the conference review software, which directly contradicts the "investigation" from the conference chairs: https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222671193527861249 https://twitter.com/xexd/status/1222671193527861249
throwgeorge 6y ago
i'm a phd student at uf (in cs not ece) and from what i can tell nothing has been done to discipline tao. there were mutterings when his student committed suicide but nothing since then.

teddyh 6y ago

A few bad apples spoils the barrel.

sk0v 6y ago

And this is exactly why I turned down a Ph.D. and always thought the community of academia (CS academia in my case) is one big pile of circle-jerk and shitty politics..

shultays 6y ago

This was one of the reasoss for me to drop from graduate and quit my research assistant job. I was working on a paper along with a professor. We sent a paper for review and one of the anonymous feedback from one of the reviewers was something like "these (a couple related papers to our subject) also would make good annotations". My professor said "this person is probably writer of those papers and asks for annotations for a good review". I was quite shocked how casual when he was talking about this

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raincom 6y ago

It is worse in humanities. Many university presses won't dare to publish books on themes that are antithetical to the dominant theories and/or paradigms. Being part of the dominant clique is necessary to publish books there.

soraminazuki 6y ago

Not directly related, but the "sign in to medium.com with Google" dialog on the top right corner with my account name on it is really freaking me out.

hereisdx 6y ago
It's an iFrame hosted on Google servers, so medium does not directly have access to the iFrame contents. But it is still irritating.
- soraminazuki 6y ago
  It's the other way around that I'm concerned with; Google tracking which Medium posts I read.

softwaredoug 6y ago

Why don’t we require CS research to be reproducible? It’s a fricken computer program. (or should be!) We also, in machine learning, never truly examine results for basic statistical significance. It’s often rather “I got this number higher”. I struggle to have even basic trust of academic CS results, unless it’s backed by a major private company research (Google research) or academics I know and trust well.

idoeestuff 6y ago

i would like add some discussions. when i say "i", you can either read "i" as i am a pc or external reviewer, or maybe im a grad student. 1. i dont want say anything which gets me trouble, but hotcrp was set up wrong by the chair in that year ISCA. i know pc members were able to download the whole paper submission list. i personally saw _all_ papers and _all_ reviewer comments on anything i did not submit. it is likely that everyone had access to this, because i am not a "big players" in this field. i really doubt i had some special access because i have no relationship to the chair that year. i still have all the papers from isca19. i should not have these, but i just got them from a normal download (no enumeration or guessing urls). 2. point 1 does not excuse leaking, just made easier. instead of calling all pc friends and asking them to call their pc friends, you just need to call one pc friend not on your submission. he could see it. 3. good luck getting tao li. hint: did he fund anyone in the past who was investigating him? did he fund anyone who reviews his papers? 4. the tao li story is deeper. a) there's race issue. because it's easier to manipulate people if your business is being a chinese -> usa faculty pipeline. and once people go through your pipeline, they are even more likely to keep it going! b) if you think the paper push is bad, wait until the details of how he actually treated his students come to life. hint: some things advisors do to students in china is immoral, but tolerated. those things are illegal in usa. 5. this is bigger than tao li. you will never get rid of the cliques, but it's at point that i don't even want read the papers anymore. why sell my integrity for grants, when i could get industry money where at least the product shows the work is not crap? 6. if you want to know some worst players, i heard they are upset they are not in micro2020 reviewer list :p. of course it's not a completely good reviewer list, our community is too small! 7. i hope one day we can honestly talk this out. i would like to tell pressuring stories :)

dbancajas 6y ago
> ld years ago because they got sick of all this nonsense. Most were happy to let those left behind play their silly peer-review games, but when the student suicide happened it was like a call to action. > It is easier to fight things from the outside, as the internal higher-ups have less power to me Why don't you start it here? Since you are already anonymous anyways?

Woodi 6y ago

Dear Scientists, I'm very curious - why you stress so much about publishing in that Elseviers, ACMEs and so on ? It's unhealty. First: there are so called "home pages" - instant publication ! I belive every univ have such infrastructure for their stuff, possible students too... Not every paper is ground breaking discovery and not every paper should be published in international and GLOBAL "jurnal". But if you realy insist then: let say USoA with 50 states so at least 50 universities... Then, if you want to publish collect, let say every half of the year, papers (eg. in Tex format) in your department, compile them into YourUniversityDepartmentYearNumber jurnal, print 50 of it, glue stamps and post to 50 libraries. Done. Include cdrom. Also you could do zines. With it's own domain name. Easy. Good content will bring readers. Do not forget about ToC, with urls. But it's not recipe for all diseases you have there. You need to step back and evaluate. Also don't allow yourself to be morphed into asholes and in two generations you will be deans and proffesors. And some environment are just viperies, move out of there !!!