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Collusion rings threaten the integrity of computer science research

707 points by djoldman 5y ago

djoldman 5y ago
FYI the author is one of the founding professors of the main ML course at Georgia Tech's online CS masters program: https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-7641-machine-learning https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-7641-machine-learning
- version_five 5y ago
  I took an online course instructed by those guys and it was great. Worth watching the videos just for the banter between them.
  - timy2shoes 5y ago
    Yeah, they had one of the best remote talks I've ever seen at last year's NeurIPS: https://nips.cc/virtual/2020/public/invited_16166.html https://nips.cc/virtual/2020/public/invited_16166.html
darig 5y ago
Collusion Rings Threaten the Integrity of Humanity
ljhsiung 5y ago
The article mentions a student taking his own life. I remember this was huge news a couple years ago at ISCA '19 and something that really shook my decision to pursue academia. After that event, SIGARCH launched an investigation. After a couple years, here were the results of that investigation. https://www.sigarch.org/other-announcements/isca-19-joint-investigative-committee-announcement/ https://www.sigarch.org/other-announcements/isca-19-joint-in... Worth noting is that the investigation actually initially found __no__ misconduct. Imagine that? A student kills himself, and you conclude it was the victim's fault, and not the environment that drove him. It was only until this post [1] emerged that they relaunched the investigation. [1] https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/evidence-put-doubts-on-the-ieee-acms-investigation-991a6d50802a https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/evidence-put-doubts-on-the-...
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That is very good work from the ACM. They don't whitewash anything, in fact they even keep the option open to re-assess their position should further details come to light. Impressed.
  - tchalla 5y ago
    From the medium article > It should have been unnecessary that we expose these evidence and challenge the result of the investigation, if the committee can drive a responsible, transparent and thorough investigation An interesting question : Did ACM require the followup Medium article to update their position? I don't know the details of the case. However, merely updating positions when situations are black and white are some of the easiest scenarios. I wouldn't be impressed if black and white situations are assessed as black and white. This doesn't mean that one shouldn't do so. I'd expect those scenarios to be a bare minimum requirement.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Yes, but you can't really fault them for that because without any evidence to go on it would have been a fishing expedition. So compared to some of these other investigations that I'm familiar with I think they did it by the book.
      - dodobirdlord 5y ago
        It’s hardly reasonable to ignore the evidence of a students suicide note making a specific and detailed accusation of academic misconduct. It’s not a fishing expedition when you’re looking for something that you have reason to believe exists.
  - oefrha 5y ago
    > They don't whitewash anything, in fact they even keep the option open to re-assess their position should further details come to light. Did I miss something? All I can gather from the announcement PDF is that “several individuals” have been disciplined to varying degrees, the least severe being just a warning letter. No names named, no other details. Most of the announcement was just reiterating they took the investigation seriously. Kind of hard to determine from the announcement what details have and have not been considered, and whether certain individuals have been punished too lightly, no? The announcement does mention a confidential report has been submitted for further review. Did anything concrete ever come out? (I suppose it would at least be relatively obvious after a while which individuals are subject to a 15-year ban.)
ncmncm 5y ago
It is probably too late to save Computer Science Research. Efforts in that direction are likely wasted. More important is to keep the contagion from spreading to allied fields. Grants probably should stop immediately. People doing serious work will need to move to another area where they might be able to contribute. People evaluating work in these other areas will need to guard against allowing theirs to be overtaken by the same downward spiral. In perhaps a generation, a similar specialty might be bootstrapped and begin to take on problems had been of interest in the old one. What to call the new specialty will be its smallest problem.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > It is probably too late to save Computer Science Research. Why do you say that? Do you have any experience in the field?
- Twisol 5y ago
  Without any personal context, this stance appears very "baby meets bathwater". In particular, I'm not sure I see anything about this particular situation that renders it purely a problem of CS research. What makes other fields (presumably) immune or less predisposed to these kinds of issues? Your position also paints CS in very broad strokes; in my experience, the only commonality between some subfields of computer science is that they use computers. Graphics, hardware architecture, programming languages, networks, and so on, are all essentially loosely coupled with their own organizing communities and directions. Some of these subfields are more closely tied to mathematics or electrical engineering than strictly to other parts of computer science. If there is an incurable "contagion" that afflicts all of these, I must admit it hard to believe that this contagion would not prove (if not already be proven) effective beyond the artificial confines of the term "computer science".
- wmf 5y ago
  Why shouldn't we assume that similar collusion exists in every scientific field?
  - neffy 5y ago
version_five 5y ago
The bigger issue here, and what is threatening the integrity of the research, is blind reliance on conference publication count as a proxy for research quality. Maybe it's time to move on from some of these conferences, and focus on interactions that maximize sharing research findings. I know that is unrealistic, but like every other metric, conference acceptance ceases to have value once the metric itself is what people care about.
- psychomugs 5y ago
  I often go back to this talk from Michael Stonebraker about, in his terms, the diarrhea of papers [1]. It's difficult to justify time towards anything that doesn't lead to a near-term publication or another line on your CV. [1] https://youtu.be/DJFKl_5JTnA?t=853 https://youtu.be/DJFKl_5JTnA?t=853
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    A really awesome talk - it's nowhere close to my field of research, but it is oh so relevant anyways, thank you for linking it and I'd recommend everyone interested in this larger topic to listen to what Stonebraker had to say on this. And one of the suggested solutions (at ~22:00) seems that it would work if it can be adopted - essentially, have top university administrators evaluate top x papers for hiring/tenure decisions and ignore everything beyond that number. What you measure is what you get; if you measure count, you get a deluge of 'least publishable units', if you measure your top 3 papers, then everyone will focus on quality instead of quantity. A counterargument probably is that it's easier for the administors to measure quantity in a way that seems objective and resistant to any arguments or appeals decisions, and it's far harder to objectively compare quality especially if the candidates are from different subfields of research.
    - anonymousDan 5y ago
      This is what the UK REF system does effectively. You get evaluated on at most your top 5 papers.
turminal 5y ago
We need a blockchain for peer reviews!
anon_tor_12345 5y ago
2 years ago Prof at my old school had a student commit suicide over being pressured to go along with this. You can Google your way to figuring out where and who. Last month Prof finally resigned. No other repercussions. People think academia is some priesthood it's not. It's a business like any other with a law of averages determined number of bad actors.
- the_benno 5y ago
  That incident is the same one referred to in the CACM article and elsewhere throughout this thread.
  - anon_tor_12345 5y ago
    Ya coming back to this post I saw the other comments. Guilty as charged of not reading the article.
- CrazyStat 5y ago
  I'm glad he finally lost his position, at least. I remember reading about that last year when the university was still defending him.
- jollybean 5y ago
  I think the people in Academia think it's a 'Priesthood' and it seems more like a 'Police Union'.
- aj7 5y ago
  Exactly.
wolverine876 5y ago
There's a 'hot' subculture in our society that says 'if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying', that refers to lies as 'hustle', that rewards and embraces deception as just agressiveness and boldness, as a norm for life and business and even a celebration of human nature - as if the worst elements of human nature define us any more than the best, as if we don't have that choice (at least, that's how I am trying to articulate it). It has predictable results. Where are we going to get reliable research, and anything else, if we can't trust each other. Trust is an incredible business tool - highly efficient when you can take risks, be vulnerable, and don't have worry about the other person. Trust is an incredible tool for personal relationships, for the same reasons, and because if you can't trust them and can't be vulnerable, you have a very limited relationship.
- hristov 5y ago
  Unfortunately it is not even a subculture. It is often openly touted in mainstream culture. Steve Jobs is often brought up as a hero of that type of thinking. You are absolutely right that trust and reliability are very valuable. Societies with high trust tend to be richer and much more productive than societies overriden by cheating and corruption.
  - undersuit 5y ago
    >Steve Jobs is often brought up as a hero of that type of thinking. Like the anecdote that he leased a new car every month so he could avoid registering it with the state.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  > There's a 'hot' subculture in our society that says 'if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying', that refers to lies as 'hustle', that rewards and embraces deception as just agressiveness and boldness, as a norm for life and business and even a celebration of human nature - as if the worst elements of human nature define us any more than the best, as if we don't have that choice (at least, that's how I am trying to articulate it). I'm not sure that you intended it this way, but this reads as very oblique (i.e., "wink and nudge"). Which subculture are you referring to, and what particular relationship do you think they have to research in Computer Science?
sjg007 5y ago
Oooh.. this sounds like a great computer science problem. "How to get an objective rating in the presence of adversaries" It is probably extensible to generic reviews as well... so things like the Amazon scam. But in contrast to Amazon, conference participants are motivated to review. I honestly don't see why all participants can't be considered as part of the peer review pool and everybody votes. I'd guess you run a risk of being scooped but maybe a conference should consist of all papers with the top N being considered worthy of publication. Maybe the remaining could be considered pre-publication... I mean everything is on ArviX anyways. So instead of bids you have randomization. Kahneman's latest book talks about this and it's been making the rounds on NPR, NyTimes etc... https://www.amazon.com/Noise-Human-Judgment-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0316451401 https://www.amazon.com/Noise-Human-Judgment-Daniel-Kahneman/...
- anon_tor_12345 5y ago
  This is not a CS problem (unless everything is a CS problem) but a very well known market design problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion
  - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
    I believe they were thinking of it as a consensus problem, where parties need to agree on an objective evaluation in the presence of adversaries eg. authors, people with very similar/identical publications, plagiarists.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  In many such events all participants are required to be part of the peer review pool. However, they review a limited amount of papers (e.g. 3) - "everybody votes" presumes that everybody has an opinion on the rating of every paper. That does not scale - getting a reasonable opinion about a random paper, i.e. reviewing it, takes significant effort; an event may have 1000 or 10000 papers, having every participant review 3 papers is already a significant amount of work, and getting much more "votes" than that for every paper is impractical. It's unfeasable and even undesirable for everyone to even skim all the submitted papers in their subfield - one big purpose of peer review is to filter out papers so that everyone else can focus on reading only a smaller selection of best papers instead of sifting through everything submitted. The deluge of papers (even "diarrhea of papers" as called in a lecture linked in another comment) is a real problem, I'm a full-time researcher and I still barely have time to read only a fraction of what's getting written.
buitreVirtual 5y ago
Collusion is one of two major problems with modern research in CS. The other one, perhaps even bigger, is its lack of substance and relevance. Most research is meant to fill out resumes with long lists of papers on impressive-sounding venues and bump institutional numbers in order to get more money and promotions. Never mind how naive, irrelevant, inapplicable or unrepresentative that research is. It's, of course, a very hard problem to solve. It takes a lot of effort to evaluate the real impact of research.
- randomsearch 5y ago
  Agree with first paragraph, less with second. I’m pretty experienced in CS. You do some research for six months and we’ll have a line meeting, I’ll know if you’re actually working on things that matter rather than boosting your CV.
schleiss 5y ago
It's sad to hear that. Other research areas like medicine, pharmacy or history probalby have the same problem but nobody is looking for it yet. My guess is, the more money is to be made or raised, the higher the chances for nefarious practices.
cryptica 5y ago
I've discovered that the software industry is made up of some of the most dishonest, insecure, power-hungry people on the face of this godless earth. Only a tiny percentage of developers seem to actually enjoy coding - Most of them have no interest in it and only see it as a mechanism to acquire money, power and influence. Disinformation is rampant because contrarians are punished and conformists are rewarded. The rot is deep in the guts of the industry. Those who have the most power and the loudest voices hoard all the attention for themselves and are unwilling to give exposure to any alternative views - Their deep insecurity drives them to surround themselves only with yes-people and to block out all critics; avoiding disagreement at all costs... Downvote, suppress, censor... Powerful people in this industry need to put aside their insecurity by embracing disagreement, allow themselves to change their minds, and give a voice to contrarian views and ideas; even when it risks hurting their current interests. Powerful people should seek the truth and try to promote the narratives which make the most sense; not the narratives which happen to benefit them the most. Everyone is free to move their money to match the changing narratives, so why do powerful people invest so much effort in keeping the focus on narratives which only maintain the status quo? To protect their friends? To protect the system? That is immoral - Capitalism was not designed for this kind of arbitrary altruism. For every person you 'help', you hurt 100 others. As much as people love to bash Elon Musk right now, he should be applauded for constantly trying to adapt to the narratives which make the most sense as opposed to rotting in his own filth and succumbing to tribalism like everyone else.
- disqard 5y ago
  Apologies, but are you using a bot? This sounds like it was generated using GPT-3. I realize you might be a human with feelings, but your screed above has a curious structure that looks... off somehow. Anyway, if you are genuinely angry and wrote the above, I acknowledge your emotions, and don't have anything else to add.
  - KirillPanov 5y ago
    No way. Any decent AI trained on HN would have figured out how to mention climate change, Stephen Wolfram, and urbanism. Definitely written by either a human or a really bad AI.
tomaskafka 5y ago
One of solutions is to let individuals choose who to trust. I can pick to not trust the certain person, or certain publication or conference, and have my personalized scientist ranking recounted. And of course, I could choose to delegate the trust, and to “follow” someone, which would mean to incorporate their rankings, especially in areas where I don’t orient that much. Do you think this would work?
- tomlockwood 5y ago
  I think the delegation of trust is already what is kind of happening in terms of academics trusting journals. I do agree that there's probably some cleverer solution on a personal level, but I think the journal system exists as a kind of guard against untrusted actors, and yet fails.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Isn’t this already how it works? The current state represents everyone doing what you describe... enough people chose to delegate trust to the publications that everyone is fighting to get into, and here we are.
- toomim 5y ago
  Yes, I think this would work, and am working on it. Message me if interested.
  - lazyjeff 5y ago
    Hey Mike, I'd be interested in being involved too. Ping me, you have my email.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Or, just have real repercussions for unethical behavior such as this. If they've identified these people, revoke reviewer status for them. If it was egregious and they have good evidence, publicly announce the revocation. If getting published has a positive benefit on a career, public information about past unethical behavior with regard to publishing and research should hopefully have a negative one.
temp329192 5y ago
I long for the long lost time when research was less of an industry. If you read 19th and early 20th research, it comes of from an alien world. You had to be curious about your subject and smart back then.
- arduinomancer 5y ago
  Agreed. You almost forget now days that "getting a PhD" or "getting a tenured position" has nothing at all to do with the process of scientific research.
- sjg007 5y ago
  I was amazed to read about W.E.B DuBois and his scientific work documenting the effect of systemic racism back in the 1900s in Philadelphia and that it leads to disparate health outcomes. There was a show on PBS that referenced it with respect to covid disparities among minorities showing that Dr. DuBois was way ahead of his time. In fact, we, as a society, still haven't learned anything more than 100 years later!
- mycologos 5y ago
  You also had to have substantial personal resources to do research, at least in the 19th century. Going back to that system would probably reduce the number of people doing science for the wrong reasons, but it would also strongly reduce the number of people doing science at all.
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    I mean, it's well within possibility for you to spend 20 years as SWE earning six figures, and then retire early to be an independent researcher. As long as you are happy to explore a field that doesn't require millions of dollars of equipment and aren't competing for fame, there's nothing stopping you.
    - temp329192 5y ago
      I'm looking forward to it.
lurker619 5y ago
Why would exposing the names of the reviewers/conferences do more harm than good? We want to discourage such behavior don't we.
- sfink 5y ago
  Because of the strong tendency to scapegoat the specific people named, drive them out of academia, and then celebrate victory while things continue in exactly the same way. (Ok, not exactly -- it improves for a while, people get sneakier, and then it continues in exactly the same way.) Chipping off the tip of an iceberg isn't a good long term strategy.
  - avaldes 5y ago
    Why wouldn't be a good thing for academia drive out unethical actors?
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      The topic is mechanisms being abused. Can the compensating mechanism you're proposing also be abused?
    - schwede 5y ago
      Too much focus on the individuals and not enough focus on the systematic problem, at least according to the author.
sfink 5y ago
I'm not in academia, but in the grand tradition of "why don't you just..." solutions crossed with "technical solutions to people problems": Would it help at all if rather than participants reviewing 3 papers, each reviewed 2 papers and validated the review of 3 more papers? This is computer science here, with things like the set NP whose defining characteristic is that it's easier to check a solution than generate it. I'm imagining having some standard that reviews are held to in order to make them validatable. When validating a review, you are just confirming that the issues brought up are reasonable. Same for the compliments. Sure, it's not perfect because the validators wouldn't dive in as deep or have as much context as the reviewers, but sitting here in my obsidian tower of industry, it seems like it would at least make collusion attacks more difficult. Hopefully without increasing the already heavy load on reviewers. (It very much seems like an incomplete solution -- we only have to look at politics and regulatory capture to see how far wrong things can go, in ways immune to straightforward interventions. Really, you need to tear down as many of the obstacles to a culture of trust as you can. Taping over the holes in a leaking bucket doesn't work for long.)
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  That would only work if the review decisions could be expected to be reasonably consistent from person to person. But, from the article: > In a well-publicized case in 2014, organizers of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference formed two independent program committees and had 10% of submissions reviewed by both. The result was that almost 60% of papers accepted by one program committee were rejected by the other, suggesting that the fate of many papers is determined by the specifics of the reviewers selected and not just the inherent value of the work itself. With this much demonstrated discrepancy between two sets of reviewers, it’s hard to believe that adding a validation step would produce a consistent improvement. How can people be expected to find improperly accepted papers when they have less than 50% agreement on the acceptance of good-faith submissions? Honestly I think this seeming randomness in acceptance is at the heart of why people might think cheating is acceptable. If the process is not reliable, why bother submitting to it?
  - sjg007 5y ago
cg563 5y ago
We actually have a paper at ICML this year on exactly defending against these collusion rings: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06020 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06020 One critical vulnerability in the current reviewing pipeline is that the reviewer assignment algorithm places too much weight on the bids. Imagine if you bid on only your friend's paper. The assignment system, if they assign you to any paper at all, is highly likely to assign you to your friend's paper. If you register duplicate accounts or if there are enough colluders, the chance of being assigned to that paper is extremely high. Fortunately, this is also easy to detect because your bid should reflect your expertise, and in this case it doesn't. What we showed in our paper is that you can reliably remove these abnormal bids. It's not a perfect solution, but it helps.
- sjg007 5y ago
  Except if you and your friend have the same area of expertise. I'd actually think that's more likely. These fields are super specialized.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Yea, I think this is likely a pretty big issue with highly specialized field - there can be an issue with new participants breaking into the field (due to an entrenched old boys club) along with a difficulty getting enough sample data specific to that corner of academia. I wonder if we could randomly assign reviewers but allow the reviewers to self-report a level of familiarity on the subject matter in general (ideally in advance) and on the paper topic in particular.
    - cg563 5y ago
      People can also cheat on this self-reported familiarity right? On specialized areas I don't see a solution, the colluders might as well be the only experts in the field so you have to enlist them no matter what. But from the description this doesn't seem like what's happening. "The colluders hide conflicts of interest, then bid to review these papers, sometimes from duplicate accounts, in an attempt to be assigned to these papers as reviewers."
tomlockwood 5y ago
It is very interesting to me that people can look at this, the replication crisis, and Sokal Squared, and not see that there is a fundamental flaw in the current model of academia as a for-profit publish-or-perish warzone, and instead declare some disciplines are somehow more bloody.
- sjg007 5y ago
  In CS basically everything is on ArXiv.. so the ideas and information are out there. The conference publication gives exposure and some credential-ism but still the idea is already out there to evaluate.
pvelagal 5y ago
why to put any artificial limit on the number of papers accepted. If it is quality research, then it should be accepted. A simple majority system should be good enough.
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hprotagonist 5y ago
academic cliques are so old that they’ve spawned their own subfields of meta-science just to analyze them.
dahart 5y ago
It has long seemed like there was soft collusion in academics anyway. There is plenty of complaining and suspicion about how bad and rigged reviews can sometimes seem to be. There are plenty of rumors of PIs who influence what gets published through back-channel alleys. But even in the absence of outright nefarious activity, there's a reinforcement cycle where bigger labs influence what papers get in, receive more grant money, and get better about influencing what papers get in. Even gently guiding what topics are acceptable, in the long term shuts out newcomers. Just about any graduate student by the time they graduate has reviewed papers in a "double blind" system where they could reliably identify the authors, there are always tell-tale markers and styles. It's really hard to find true anonymity. I've been thinking on an off about review system that might improve on things. I'm imagining perhaps: reviewers and authors both get to see who they are, and conflicts of interest can be called out by other people after review and before publication; reviewers are chosen at random, not allowed to bid; reviewers are sent a series of pairs of papers, and asked to choose which one they'd rather see, scores and ultimately publication can be decided by rank choice vote rather than reviewer assignment; comments on paper improvement would be completely optional. Would this be better or worse than what we have? Would it deter explicit collusion?
- dasudasu 5y ago
  You can’t be as candid in your criticisms if the identity of the reviewers is made available to the authors. This is the main reason they’re made anonymous. If you think there can be a conflict of interest, the main mechanism in most fields is to point who shouldn’t be a reviewer for your paper. If you forget someone and they are asked, it’s also their responsibility to recuse themselves. Of course it’s based on trust. Trust is still the foundation of academia.
  - dahart 5y ago
    I’d agree with all those thoughts with respect to the system we have today. Yes, the goal of de-anonymizing reviews would be to eliminate trust in reviewers as a requirement for achieving impartial and fair reviewing (given the many ways we’ve already seen trust failure), and hopefully the side effect would be to increase overall trust in the system. Making reviewers part of the public record would also allow exposure of bad behavior and explicit collusion, without having to go to great lengths to prove it like they did in the article. I’m not entirely sure that the level of candidness that anonymity invites is necessary or helpful for a healthy and robust review system. But, note that my suggestion above doesn’t depend on critical feedback at all. One of the things I’ve found problematic in today’s review system is that reviewers assign absolute scores to a paper, but every reviewer has their own notion of what is good and bad. It’s common for an entire group of reviewers in one sub-topic to give average lower scores than a group in another sub-topic, meaning that different sections of a given journal or conference have different acceptance rates. My suggestion for rank choice voting is partly to ensure that all reviewers are working in the same units, and are all weighted equally. (But I assume there is a possibility of unintended consequences and/or opportunities to game the system with what I suggested, so I’m curious if people see ways that might happen.)
throwaway1959 5y ago
I fully support the concerns that the author brings up. It's a big problem and we need to figure out how to address it. At the same time, I can't help but notice that this is coming from the ACM itself. The credibility of ACM has really tanked in my eyes in the last 2 - 3 years. Communications of the ACM magazine is full of articles that belong to the "social engineering magazine" and not to the Computer Science publication. Last time I was renewing my membership, I had to sign some kind of a pledge "not to harass people". Are you kidding me? What are we, 12? Because of that, while it's a very important issue, I am very distracted thinking about ACM itself. I guess this is a lesson that reputation and credibility is important. Once you lose it, everything you say, even if it's truly good, gets colored in a certain way.
jll29 5y ago
One way forward could be to lower the bar for publications. Once it's no longer about being in the esteemed and scarce "10%", they won't bother because they don't need to. Imagine a process where the only criteria are technical soundness and novelty, and as long as minimal standards are met, it's a "go". Call it the "ArXiv + quality check" model. Neither formal acceptance to publish nor citation numbers truly mark scientific excellence; perhaps, winning a "test of time award" does, or appearing in a text book 10 years later.
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jll29 5y ago
One way forward could be to lower the bar for publications. Once it's no longer about being in the esteemed and scarce "10%", they won't bother because they don't need to. Imagine a process where the only criteria are technical soundness and novelty, and as long as minimal standards are met, it's a "go". Call it the "ArXiv + quality check" model. Neither formal acceptance to publish nor citation numbers truly mark scientific excellence; perhaps, winning a "test of time award" does, or appearing in a text book 10 years later. I've been reviewing occasionally since ~1995, regularly since ~2004, and I've never heard of collusion rings happening in my sub-area of CS (ML, IR, NLP). I have caught people submitting to multiple conferences without disclosing it. Ignoring past work that is relevant is common, more often our of blissful ignorance, and occasionally likely with full intent. I'm not saying I doubt the report, but I suspect the bigger problem that CS has is a large percentage of poor-quality work that couldn't be replicated. BTW, the most blantant thing I've heard of (from a contact complaining about it on LinkedIn) is someone had their very own core paper from their PhD thesis plagiarised - submitted to another conference (again) but with different author names on it... and they even cited the real author's PhD thesis!
- mycologos 5y ago
  > Imagine a process where the only criteria are technical soundness and novelty, and as long as minimal standards are met, it's a "go". Call it the "ArXiv + quality check" model. One possible issue is that researchers usually need to justify their research to somebody who's not in their field. Conferences are one way to do this. So are citation counts. Both are highly imperfect, but outsiders typically want some signal that doesn't require being an expert in a person's chosen field. The "Arxiv + quality check" model doesn't seem to provide this. > I suspect the bigger problem that CS has is a large percentage of poor-quality work that couldn't be replicated. As a sort of ML researcher for several years, I agree.
  - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
    As a fellow ML researcher, I want to add that the lack of code along with the publication makes the problem worse.$BIGGROUP gets a paper whose core contribution is a library, published, and yet they haven't released the code 6 months after the conference, effectively claiming credits for something unverifiable.
colour 5y ago
I'm looking forward to when academia actually tumbles down. People like James Burke have been awaiting this for ages.
- SquibblesRedux 5y ago
  > People like James Burke have been awaiting this for ages. I would like to more about this. Can you point to any interviews or other materials that shed light on Burke's thoughts on academia?
  - colour 5y ago
    The conclusion of connections season 1 pretty much is that knowledge needs to made more freely available. He has also held a dozen of long winded talks on the topic like e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvIy52kX-uU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvIy52kX-uU There also exists this quite more concise interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3XoLycc9io https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3XoLycc9io
ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
Sometimes the collusion is blatantly obvious. Back in grad school a colleague of mine spent nine months on an experiment in a new field and submitted it as a paper to a quality journal. Six months later, the paper was rejected for lack of novelty: One of the reviewers had found a paper with a figure-by-figure duplication of the same experiment -- published on arXiv a week before the rejection decision. Both the managing editor and the author on the arXiv paper were from Chinese universities. We wrote a rebuttal and submitted a complaint to the journal editor, but no justice was forthcoming. My colleage switched research directions to avoid the collusion and now takes pains not to submit papers without a coauthor who has enough clout in the field to deter blatant research theft. He also avoids dealing with editors from institutions in China. He ended up graduating two years later than planned.
- JoeyBananas 5y ago
  that's a good reason to put it papers on arxiv before you submit them
- Eridrus 5y ago
  The other way to mitigate this is to put your work on ArXiv before submitting it to conferences/journals, which is becoming more and more acceptable in at least some CS sub-fields.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    This is becoming more popular in another field (non-CS) I follow, but for different reasons: Some have been posting their papers to pre-print servers and then skipping straight to commercialization attempts. This is especially concerning in the health and fitness world, where some supplement makers and fitness gurus are uploading documents to pre-print servers to give the illusion of being published authors. Casual observers may not be able to tell the difference between published, peer-reviewed papers and some random document uploaded that has a DOI on a pre-print server. This doesn’t carry much weight in academia, but it can fool non-academic observers. I’m not sure if or how it will translate to CS papers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if skipping peer review becomes more common as the pace of publishing increases.
fouc 5y ago
I just got a 500 response from this link.
- argonix 5y ago
  try this https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3429776 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3429776
djoldman 5y ago
Backup: https://archive.is/z3szt https://archive.is/z3szt
jvanderbot 5y ago
One side comment: It's true that the focus on publications has made the # of papers go through the roof. On the other hand, I can quickly sift through papers using google scholar, whereas I never could before. For any fact I'm looking into, reams have been written about it. This is, to my experience, a huge boon to writing papers and doing research quickly. This has nothing to do with collusion, but some in this thread are saying that just the number of papers is indicative of a problem.
ajarmst 5y ago
The part I found interesting was that the author notes that it is well-known that the quality of the work has little to do with its odds of acceptance even when the system is 'functioning' as designed. Is it cheating to game a system that is already fundamentally broken? If the quality of your work is inadequate to secure publication and your career depends on it, it wouldn't be very hard to convince yourself that you can't cheat a rigged game. What 'integrity' is actually being threatened? Perhaps some of the energy devoted to identifying these collusion rings would be better spent developing a review process that is at least somewhat biased in favour of good research rather than the density of the authors' professional network. Or at least in mitigating the poisonous 'publish or perish' rules that lead to this sort of phenomena.
- mycologos 5y ago
  > the author notes that it is well-known that the quality of the work has little to do with its odds of acceptance even when the system is 'functioning' as designed I think this is a little more pessimistic than what the piece says. The NeurIPS (then-NIPS) experiment said that about 60% of papers accepted by one PC got rejected by the other. That doesn't actually mean "the quality of the work has little to do with its odds of acceptance". It may just be that there's a paper has to cross a quality threshold, and once it's past, then the outcome has a lot more variation. My personal take on NeurIPS specifically is that there's a fraction of bad papers, maybe 40%, that probably shouldn't and won't get in. Then there's a minority of very nice papers that probably should and will get in, maybe 5-10%. And then there are a bunch of middling papers where a lot of it is luck and drawing friendly reviewers. But these aren't bad papers, and you can't really just churn them out, they're just not very good papers.
  - fulafel 5y ago
    Seems it's also rational for an opportunistic player of the publications game to split their work into the maximal number of marginally acceptable publications, which would result in a high rejection %.
    - 5y ago
bo1024 5y ago
Very sad to hear about this. The top theory conferences are much smaller. Reviewers are usually invited to participate by a committee member who has met them personally or at least knows their body of work. If a low-quality paper was accepted, many people would notice. There are downsides, but the upside is that these kinds of collusion tactics wouldn't have a chance.
javert 5y ago
Many people are proposing "fixes" for this kind of behavior in the comments. Fundamentally, there is no way to fix it, because the system is self-disregulating. In other words, there is no mechanism to bring the academic system back to honesty over time; there is a mechanism to make it more dishonest over time. This is inherent to government solutions. In modern times, democracy was supposed to be the regulating mechanism of the bureaucracy, but obviously isn't working. The bureaucracy itself certainly is disregulatory. Modern academia is simply an organ of the larger government bureaucracy.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tragiclos 5y ago
While this practice is certainly bad, it seems like an inevitable consequence of rating professional development based on publication in specific journals. Perhaps if they were evaluated based on the feedback of their manager and coworkers, as in other fields, this would be less of an issue.
nomoreplease 5y ago
I wonder how many other conferences have this same collusion going on. I remember reading a similar story years ago for anthropology/sociology/pedagogy (cannot remember which)
joe_the_user 5y ago
It's worth noting some context: - Conferences and participants have increased exponentially over the last few years. - Students in AI/ML graduate programs have similarly increased. - Huge numbers of companies are hiring AI/ML graduates. - What constitutes a true advance AI/ML is difficult to determine. Deep learning is fairly ad-hoc method - a tweak to an existing method that allows you exceed soto (state of the art) is the simplest way to get attention. But that's not a method and so you're many others pushing similar tweaks also. This environment in particular seems like it would exacerbate all the ordinary pressures to cheat found in the academic environment. It has something of the quality of the last blow-out of a bubble. And the thing is that even with deep learning being real, the dynamics seem fated to push things to the point that expectation are sufficiently far past reality that the whole collapses, for a bit.
known 5y ago
This collusion is prevalent among Brahmin caste in South Asia since 700 BC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism)
machinelearning 5y ago
The same cartel in each sub field follows you from conference to conference too. I’ve seen often that these people bid for the papers in a particular subfield and get assigned to the paper that they rejected in the previous conference. I’ve seen two reviewers give the exact same review at two different conferences even though the paper had incorporated the changes from the previous one. Thankfully the AC was receptive to the concerns raised by the author and the paper was accepted.
randomsearch 5y ago
This is a bit surprising, but hardly the biggest problem. I’ve posted before about it, but academic has to get away from the infantilism of using KPIs to judge creative intellectual work. Part of the problem is that people seem to want an objective evaluation of a piece of research, and measure the value for taxpayer money. Well, you can’t get an objective evaluation. It’s all subjective. And “impact” as a quantifiable entity in general is nonsense, for one thing the timescales prohibit its measurement at the point where it may be useful. The solution is to use management. Lots of people object here and say “but nepotism, favouritism” and yep that’s a problem, but it is less of a problem that the decline of western universities. You can circumvent it somewhat by rotation, by involving external figures, by a hierarchy that ensures people are not colluding, but ultimately you just have to trust people and accept some wastage. People aren’t in academia for the money. It’s a vocation. You’re not going to have many people milking the system. Things went pretty well before the metric culture invaded the academy. They can go well again.
- pfortuny 5y ago
  This is a laudable opinion BUT. (Speaking about Spain). The KPIs are there because OFFICIALLY (and this is strictly so) you are not even allowed to get a tenured position without an absurd number of (in Maths) JCR papers IN THE FIRST QUARTILE. This is so stupid it is not even funny but how can you fight that when your PhD students depend on those metrics?
  - dheera 5y ago
    Personally I think we need to do away with tenure. Academic institutions should just hire good researchers as employees and do good research. There was a time in history when tenure made sense, but today the tenure track process forces a lot of people to go after low-hanging fruit that has a high probability of being accepted for publication, instead of trying things that are meaningful to try but may fail.
    - pfortuny 5y ago
      That is precisely why tenure is important: you can think without time pressures.
seibelj 5y ago
HN is so funny - here is a thread where I tried to articulate how incredibly broken the academic system is, and tons of HN academics claimed it was perfect and downvoted me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27242576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27242576 I guess the system is inherently broken after all?
jorgBaller 5y ago
Right wing computer scientists always keep talking about collisions. Why can't they write better papers? If they did, the papers would be accepted for sure
gher-shyu3i 5y ago
This isn't surprising, and it isn't limited to CS research. I've known people who got papers in different fields because of a similar approach. It's also noteworthy that it seems that Chinese engage in this quite a bit, either due to their culture that does not forbid cheating (e.g. see how they pass the GRE or other standard tests) or because there are a lot of them.
ritmatter 5y ago
Serious question: why are paper authors allowed to be reviewers at all? That seems like the main logistical issue in this review process.
ritmatter 5y ago
Why are paper authors able to also act as reviewers? This seems to be a big part of the problem. Is there a lack of topical experts?
- bo1024 5y ago
  Yes. A large fraction of the experts are submitting to the same most-prestigious conferences every year.
tpoacher 5y ago
Also known as the Lance Armstrong principle.
rcpt 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."

707 points by djoldman 5y ago

FYI the author is one of the founding professors of the main ML course at Georgia Tech's online CS masters program: https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-7641-machine-learning https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-7641-machine-learning

version_five 5y ago
I took an online course instructed by those guys and it was great. Worth watching the videos just for the banter between them.
- timy2shoes 5y ago
  Yeah, they had one of the best remote talks I've ever seen at last year's NeurIPS: https://nips.cc/virtual/2020/public/invited_16166.html https://nips.cc/virtual/2020/public/invited_16166.html

darig 5y ago

Collusion Rings Threaten the Integrity of Humanity

ljhsiung 5y ago

The article mentions a student taking his own life. I remember this was huge news a couple years ago at ISCA '19 and something that really shook my decision to pursue academia. After that event, SIGARCH launched an investigation. After a couple years, here were the results of that investigation. https://www.sigarch.org/other-announcements/isca-19-joint-investigative-committee-announcement/ https://www.sigarch.org/other-announcements/isca-19-joint-in... Worth noting is that the investigation actually initially found __no__ misconduct. Imagine that? A student kills himself, and you conclude it was the victim's fault, and not the environment that drove him. It was only until this post [1] emerged that they relaunched the investigation. [1] https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/evidence-put-doubts-on-the-ieee-acms-investigation-991a6d50802a https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/evidence-put-doubts-on-the-...

jacquesm 5y ago
That is very good work from the ACM. They don't whitewash anything, in fact they even keep the option open to re-assess their position should further details come to light. Impressed.
- tchalla 5y ago
  From the medium article > It should have been unnecessary that we expose these evidence and challenge the result of the investigation, if the committee can drive a responsible, transparent and thorough investigation An interesting question : Did ACM require the followup Medium article to update their position? I don't know the details of the case. However, merely updating positions when situations are black and white are some of the easiest scenarios. I wouldn't be impressed if black and white situations are assessed as black and white. This doesn't mean that one shouldn't do so. I'd expect those scenarios to be a bare minimum requirement.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Yes, but you can't really fault them for that because without any evidence to go on it would have been a fishing expedition. So compared to some of these other investigations that I'm familiar with I think they did it by the book.
    - dodobirdlord 5y ago
      It’s hardly reasonable to ignore the evidence of a students suicide note making a specific and detailed accusation of academic misconduct. It’s not a fishing expedition when you’re looking for something that you have reason to believe exists.
- oefrha 5y ago
  > They don't whitewash anything, in fact they even keep the option open to re-assess their position should further details come to light. Did I miss something? All I can gather from the announcement PDF is that “several individuals” have been disciplined to varying degrees, the least severe being just a warning letter. No names named, no other details. Most of the announcement was just reiterating they took the investigation seriously. Kind of hard to determine from the announcement what details have and have not been considered, and whether certain individuals have been punished too lightly, no? The announcement does mention a confidential report has been submitted for further review. Did anything concrete ever come out? (I suppose it would at least be relatively obvious after a while which individuals are subject to a 15-year ban.)

ncmncm 5y ago

It is probably too late to save Computer Science Research. Efforts in that direction are likely wasted. More important is to keep the contagion from spreading to allied fields. Grants probably should stop immediately. People doing serious work will need to move to another area where they might be able to contribute. People evaluating work in these other areas will need to guard against allowing theirs to be overtaken by the same downward spiral. In perhaps a generation, a similar specialty might be bootstrapped and begin to take on problems had been of interest in the old one. What to call the new specialty will be its smallest problem.

wolverine876 5y ago
> It is probably too late to save Computer Science Research. Why do you say that? Do you have any experience in the field?
Twisol 5y ago
Without any personal context, this stance appears very "baby meets bathwater". In particular, I'm not sure I see anything about this particular situation that renders it purely a problem of CS research. What makes other fields (presumably) immune or less predisposed to these kinds of issues? Your position also paints CS in very broad strokes; in my experience, the only commonality between some subfields of computer science is that they use computers. Graphics, hardware architecture, programming languages, networks, and so on, are all essentially loosely coupled with their own organizing communities and directions. Some of these subfields are more closely tied to mathematics or electrical engineering than strictly to other parts of computer science. If there is an incurable "contagion" that afflicts all of these, I must admit it hard to believe that this contagion would not prove (if not already be proven) effective beyond the artificial confines of the term "computer science".
wmf 5y ago
Why shouldn't we assume that similar collusion exists in every scientific field?
- neffy 5y ago

version_five 5y ago

The bigger issue here, and what is threatening the integrity of the research, is blind reliance on conference publication count as a proxy for research quality. Maybe it's time to move on from some of these conferences, and focus on interactions that maximize sharing research findings. I know that is unrealistic, but like every other metric, conference acceptance ceases to have value once the metric itself is what people care about.

psychomugs 5y ago
I often go back to this talk from Michael Stonebraker about, in his terms, the diarrhea of papers [1]. It's difficult to justify time towards anything that doesn't lead to a near-term publication or another line on your CV. [1] https://youtu.be/DJFKl_5JTnA?t=853 https://youtu.be/DJFKl_5JTnA?t=853
- PeterisP 5y ago
  A really awesome talk - it's nowhere close to my field of research, but it is oh so relevant anyways, thank you for linking it and I'd recommend everyone interested in this larger topic to listen to what Stonebraker had to say on this. And one of the suggested solutions (at ~22:00) seems that it would work if it can be adopted - essentially, have top university administrators evaluate top x papers for hiring/tenure decisions and ignore everything beyond that number. What you measure is what you get; if you measure count, you get a deluge of 'least publishable units', if you measure your top 3 papers, then everyone will focus on quality instead of quantity. A counterargument probably is that it's easier for the administors to measure quantity in a way that seems objective and resistant to any arguments or appeals decisions, and it's far harder to objectively compare quality especially if the candidates are from different subfields of research.
  - anonymousDan 5y ago
    This is what the UK REF system does effectively. You get evaluated on at most your top 5 papers.

turminal 5y ago

We need a blockchain for peer reviews!

anon_tor_12345 5y ago

2 years ago Prof at my old school had a student commit suicide over being pressured to go along with this. You can Google your way to figuring out where and who. Last month Prof finally resigned. No other repercussions. People think academia is some priesthood it's not. It's a business like any other with a law of averages determined number of bad actors.

the_benno 5y ago
That incident is the same one referred to in the CACM article and elsewhere throughout this thread.
- anon_tor_12345 5y ago
  Ya coming back to this post I saw the other comments. Guilty as charged of not reading the article.
CrazyStat 5y ago
I'm glad he finally lost his position, at least. I remember reading about that last year when the university was still defending him.
jollybean 5y ago
I think the people in Academia think it's a 'Priesthood' and it seems more like a 'Police Union'.
aj7 5y ago
Exactly.

wolverine876 5y ago

There's a 'hot' subculture in our society that says 'if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying', that refers to lies as 'hustle', that rewards and embraces deception as just agressiveness and boldness, as a norm for life and business and even a celebration of human nature - as if the worst elements of human nature define us any more than the best, as if we don't have that choice (at least, that's how I am trying to articulate it). It has predictable results. Where are we going to get reliable research, and anything else, if we can't trust each other. Trust is an incredible business tool - highly efficient when you can take risks, be vulnerable, and don't have worry about the other person. Trust is an incredible tool for personal relationships, for the same reasons, and because if you can't trust them and can't be vulnerable, you have a very limited relationship.

hristov 5y ago
Unfortunately it is not even a subculture. It is often openly touted in mainstream culture. Steve Jobs is often brought up as a hero of that type of thinking. You are absolutely right that trust and reliability are very valuable. Societies with high trust tend to be richer and much more productive than societies overriden by cheating and corruption.
- undersuit 5y ago
  >Steve Jobs is often brought up as a hero of that type of thinking. Like the anecdote that he leased a new car every month so he could avoid registering it with the state.
woodruffw 5y ago
> There's a 'hot' subculture in our society that says 'if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying', that refers to lies as 'hustle', that rewards and embraces deception as just agressiveness and boldness, as a norm for life and business and even a celebration of human nature - as if the worst elements of human nature define us any more than the best, as if we don't have that choice (at least, that's how I am trying to articulate it). I'm not sure that you intended it this way, but this reads as very oblique (i.e., "wink and nudge"). Which subculture are you referring to, and what particular relationship do you think they have to research in Computer Science?

sjg007 5y ago

Oooh.. this sounds like a great computer science problem. "How to get an objective rating in the presence of adversaries" It is probably extensible to generic reviews as well... so things like the Amazon scam. But in contrast to Amazon, conference participants are motivated to review. I honestly don't see why all participants can't be considered as part of the peer review pool and everybody votes. I'd guess you run a risk of being scooped but maybe a conference should consist of all papers with the top N being considered worthy of publication. Maybe the remaining could be considered pre-publication... I mean everything is on ArviX anyways. So instead of bids you have randomization. Kahneman's latest book talks about this and it's been making the rounds on NPR, NyTimes etc... https://www.amazon.com/Noise-Human-Judgment-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0316451401 https://www.amazon.com/Noise-Human-Judgment-Daniel-Kahneman/...

anon_tor_12345 5y ago
This is not a CS problem (unless everything is a CS problem) but a very well known market design problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago
  I believe they were thinking of it as a consensus problem, where parties need to agree on an objective evaluation in the presence of adversaries eg. authors, people with very similar/identical publications, plagiarists.
PeterisP 5y ago
In many such events all participants are required to be part of the peer review pool. However, they review a limited amount of papers (e.g. 3) - "everybody votes" presumes that everybody has an opinion on the rating of every paper. That does not scale - getting a reasonable opinion about a random paper, i.e. reviewing it, takes significant effort; an event may have 1000 or 10000 papers, having every participant review 3 papers is already a significant amount of work, and getting much more "votes" than that for every paper is impractical. It's unfeasable and even undesirable for everyone to even skim all the submitted papers in their subfield - one big purpose of peer review is to filter out papers so that everyone else can focus on reading only a smaller selection of best papers instead of sifting through everything submitted. The deluge of papers (even "diarrhea of papers" as called in a lecture linked in another comment) is a real problem, I'm a full-time researcher and I still barely have time to read only a fraction of what's getting written.

buitreVirtual 5y ago

Collusion is one of two major problems with modern research in CS. The other one, perhaps even bigger, is its lack of substance and relevance. Most research is meant to fill out resumes with long lists of papers on impressive-sounding venues and bump institutional numbers in order to get more money and promotions. Never mind how naive, irrelevant, inapplicable or unrepresentative that research is. It's, of course, a very hard problem to solve. It takes a lot of effort to evaluate the real impact of research.

randomsearch 5y ago
Agree with first paragraph, less with second. I’m pretty experienced in CS. You do some research for six months and we’ll have a line meeting, I’ll know if you’re actually working on things that matter rather than boosting your CV.

schleiss 5y ago

It's sad to hear that. Other research areas like medicine, pharmacy or history probalby have the same problem but nobody is looking for it yet. My guess is, the more money is to be made or raised, the higher the chances for nefarious practices.

cryptica 5y ago

I've discovered that the software industry is made up of some of the most dishonest, insecure, power-hungry people on the face of this godless earth. Only a tiny percentage of developers seem to actually enjoy coding - Most of them have no interest in it and only see it as a mechanism to acquire money, power and influence. Disinformation is rampant because contrarians are punished and conformists are rewarded. The rot is deep in the guts of the industry. Those who have the most power and the loudest voices hoard all the attention for themselves and are unwilling to give exposure to any alternative views - Their deep insecurity drives them to surround themselves only with yes-people and to block out all critics; avoiding disagreement at all costs... Downvote, suppress, censor... Powerful people in this industry need to put aside their insecurity by embracing disagreement, allow themselves to change their minds, and give a voice to contrarian views and ideas; even when it risks hurting their current interests. Powerful people should seek the truth and try to promote the narratives which make the most sense; not the narratives which happen to benefit them the most. Everyone is free to move their money to match the changing narratives, so why do powerful people invest so much effort in keeping the focus on narratives which only maintain the status quo? To protect their friends? To protect the system? That is immoral - Capitalism was not designed for this kind of arbitrary altruism. For every person you 'help', you hurt 100 others. As much as people love to bash Elon Musk right now, he should be applauded for constantly trying to adapt to the narratives which make the most sense as opposed to rotting in his own filth and succumbing to tribalism like everyone else.

disqard 5y ago
Apologies, but are you using a bot? This sounds like it was generated using GPT-3. I realize you might be a human with feelings, but your screed above has a curious structure that looks... off somehow. Anyway, if you are genuinely angry and wrote the above, I acknowledge your emotions, and don't have anything else to add.
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  No way. Any decent AI trained on HN would have figured out how to mention climate change, Stephen Wolfram, and urbanism. Definitely written by either a human or a really bad AI.

tomaskafka 5y ago

One of solutions is to let individuals choose who to trust. I can pick to not trust the certain person, or certain publication or conference, and have my personalized scientist ranking recounted. And of course, I could choose to delegate the trust, and to “follow” someone, which would mean to incorporate their rankings, especially in areas where I don’t orient that much. Do you think this would work?

tomlockwood 5y ago
I think the delegation of trust is already what is kind of happening in terms of academics trusting journals. I do agree that there's probably some cleverer solution on a personal level, but I think the journal system exists as a kind of guard against untrusted actors, and yet fails.
cortesoft 5y ago
Isn’t this already how it works? The current state represents everyone doing what you describe... enough people chose to delegate trust to the publications that everyone is fighting to get into, and here we are.
toomim 5y ago
Yes, I think this would work, and am working on it. Message me if interested.
- lazyjeff 5y ago
  Hey Mike, I'd be interested in being involved too. Ping me, you have my email.
kbenson 5y ago
Or, just have real repercussions for unethical behavior such as this. If they've identified these people, revoke reviewer status for them. If it was egregious and they have good evidence, publicly announce the revocation. If getting published has a positive benefit on a career, public information about past unethical behavior with regard to publishing and research should hopefully have a negative one.

temp329192 5y ago

I long for the long lost time when research was less of an industry. If you read 19th and early 20th research, it comes of from an alien world. You had to be curious about your subject and smart back then.

arduinomancer 5y ago
Agreed. You almost forget now days that "getting a PhD" or "getting a tenured position" has nothing at all to do with the process of scientific research.
sjg007 5y ago
I was amazed to read about W.E.B DuBois and his scientific work documenting the effect of systemic racism back in the 1900s in Philadelphia and that it leads to disparate health outcomes. There was a show on PBS that referenced it with respect to covid disparities among minorities showing that Dr. DuBois was way ahead of his time. In fact, we, as a society, still haven't learned anything more than 100 years later!
mycologos 5y ago
You also had to have substantial personal resources to do research, at least in the 19th century. Going back to that system would probably reduce the number of people doing science for the wrong reasons, but it would also strongly reduce the number of people doing science at all.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  I mean, it's well within possibility for you to spend 20 years as SWE earning six figures, and then retire early to be an independent researcher. As long as you are happy to explore a field that doesn't require millions of dollars of equipment and aren't competing for fame, there's nothing stopping you.
  - temp329192 5y ago
    I'm looking forward to it.

lurker619 5y ago

Why would exposing the names of the reviewers/conferences do more harm than good? We want to discourage such behavior don't we.

sfink 5y ago
Because of the strong tendency to scapegoat the specific people named, drive them out of academia, and then celebrate victory while things continue in exactly the same way. (Ok, not exactly -- it improves for a while, people get sneakier, and then it continues in exactly the same way.) Chipping off the tip of an iceberg isn't a good long term strategy.
- avaldes 5y ago
  Why wouldn't be a good thing for academia drive out unethical actors?
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    The topic is mechanisms being abused. Can the compensating mechanism you're proposing also be abused?
  - schwede 5y ago
    Too much focus on the individuals and not enough focus on the systematic problem, at least according to the author.

sfink 5y ago

I'm not in academia, but in the grand tradition of "why don't you just..." solutions crossed with "technical solutions to people problems": Would it help at all if rather than participants reviewing 3 papers, each reviewed 2 papers and validated the review of 3 more papers? This is computer science here, with things like the set NP whose defining characteristic is that it's easier to check a solution than generate it. I'm imagining having some standard that reviews are held to in order to make them validatable. When validating a review, you are just confirming that the issues brought up are reasonable. Same for the compliments. Sure, it's not perfect because the validators wouldn't dive in as deep or have as much context as the reviewers, but sitting here in my obsidian tower of industry, it seems like it would at least make collusion attacks more difficult. Hopefully without increasing the already heavy load on reviewers. (It very much seems like an incomplete solution -- we only have to look at politics and regulatory capture to see how far wrong things can go, in ways immune to straightforward interventions. Really, you need to tear down as many of the obstacles to a culture of trust as you can. Taping over the holes in a leaking bucket doesn't work for long.)

snowwrestler 5y ago
That would only work if the review decisions could be expected to be reasonably consistent from person to person. But, from the article: > In a well-publicized case in 2014, organizers of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference formed two independent program committees and had 10% of submissions reviewed by both. The result was that almost 60% of papers accepted by one program committee were rejected by the other, suggesting that the fate of many papers is determined by the specifics of the reviewers selected and not just the inherent value of the work itself. With this much demonstrated discrepancy between two sets of reviewers, it’s hard to believe that adding a validation step would produce a consistent improvement. How can people be expected to find improperly accepted papers when they have less than 50% agreement on the acceptance of good-faith submissions? Honestly I think this seeming randomness in acceptance is at the heart of why people might think cheating is acceptable. If the process is not reliable, why bother submitting to it?
- sjg007 5y ago

cg563 5y ago

We actually have a paper at ICML this year on exactly defending against these collusion rings: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06020 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06020 One critical vulnerability in the current reviewing pipeline is that the reviewer assignment algorithm places too much weight on the bids. Imagine if you bid on only your friend's paper. The assignment system, if they assign you to any paper at all, is highly likely to assign you to your friend's paper. If you register duplicate accounts or if there are enough colluders, the chance of being assigned to that paper is extremely high. Fortunately, this is also easy to detect because your bid should reflect your expertise, and in this case it doesn't. What we showed in our paper is that you can reliably remove these abnormal bids. It's not a perfect solution, but it helps.

sjg007 5y ago
Except if you and your friend have the same area of expertise. I'd actually think that's more likely. These fields are super specialized.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Yea, I think this is likely a pretty big issue with highly specialized field - there can be an issue with new participants breaking into the field (due to an entrenched old boys club) along with a difficulty getting enough sample data specific to that corner of academia. I wonder if we could randomly assign reviewers but allow the reviewers to self-report a level of familiarity on the subject matter in general (ideally in advance) and on the paper topic in particular.
  - cg563 5y ago
    People can also cheat on this self-reported familiarity right? On specialized areas I don't see a solution, the colluders might as well be the only experts in the field so you have to enlist them no matter what. But from the description this doesn't seem like what's happening. "The colluders hide conflicts of interest, then bid to review these papers, sometimes from duplicate accounts, in an attempt to be assigned to these papers as reviewers."

tomlockwood 5y ago

It is very interesting to me that people can look at this, the replication crisis, and Sokal Squared, and not see that there is a fundamental flaw in the current model of academia as a for-profit publish-or-perish warzone, and instead declare some disciplines are somehow more bloody.

sjg007 5y ago
In CS basically everything is on ArXiv.. so the ideas and information are out there. The conference publication gives exposure and some credential-ism but still the idea is already out there to evaluate.

pvelagal 5y ago

why to put any artificial limit on the number of papers accepted. If it is quality research, then it should be accepted. A simple majority system should be good enough.

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hprotagonist 5y ago

academic cliques are so old that they’ve spawned their own subfields of meta-science just to analyze them.

dahart 5y ago

It has long seemed like there was soft collusion in academics anyway. There is plenty of complaining and suspicion about how bad and rigged reviews can sometimes seem to be. There are plenty of rumors of PIs who influence what gets published through back-channel alleys. But even in the absence of outright nefarious activity, there's a reinforcement cycle where bigger labs influence what papers get in, receive more grant money, and get better about influencing what papers get in. Even gently guiding what topics are acceptable, in the long term shuts out newcomers. Just about any graduate student by the time they graduate has reviewed papers in a "double blind" system where they could reliably identify the authors, there are always tell-tale markers and styles. It's really hard to find true anonymity. I've been thinking on an off about review system that might improve on things. I'm imagining perhaps: reviewers and authors both get to see who they are, and conflicts of interest can be called out by other people after review and before publication; reviewers are chosen at random, not allowed to bid; reviewers are sent a series of pairs of papers, and asked to choose which one they'd rather see, scores and ultimately publication can be decided by rank choice vote rather than reviewer assignment; comments on paper improvement would be completely optional. Would this be better or worse than what we have? Would it deter explicit collusion?

dasudasu 5y ago
You can’t be as candid in your criticisms if the identity of the reviewers is made available to the authors. This is the main reason they’re made anonymous. If you think there can be a conflict of interest, the main mechanism in most fields is to point who shouldn’t be a reviewer for your paper. If you forget someone and they are asked, it’s also their responsibility to recuse themselves. Of course it’s based on trust. Trust is still the foundation of academia.
- dahart 5y ago
  I’d agree with all those thoughts with respect to the system we have today. Yes, the goal of de-anonymizing reviews would be to eliminate trust in reviewers as a requirement for achieving impartial and fair reviewing (given the many ways we’ve already seen trust failure), and hopefully the side effect would be to increase overall trust in the system. Making reviewers part of the public record would also allow exposure of bad behavior and explicit collusion, without having to go to great lengths to prove it like they did in the article. I’m not entirely sure that the level of candidness that anonymity invites is necessary or helpful for a healthy and robust review system. But, note that my suggestion above doesn’t depend on critical feedback at all. One of the things I’ve found problematic in today’s review system is that reviewers assign absolute scores to a paper, but every reviewer has their own notion of what is good and bad. It’s common for an entire group of reviewers in one sub-topic to give average lower scores than a group in another sub-topic, meaning that different sections of a given journal or conference have different acceptance rates. My suggestion for rank choice voting is partly to ensure that all reviewers are working in the same units, and are all weighted equally. (But I assume there is a possibility of unintended consequences and/or opportunities to game the system with what I suggested, so I’m curious if people see ways that might happen.)

throwaway1959 5y ago

I fully support the concerns that the author brings up. It's a big problem and we need to figure out how to address it. At the same time, I can't help but notice that this is coming from the ACM itself. The credibility of ACM has really tanked in my eyes in the last 2 - 3 years. Communications of the ACM magazine is full of articles that belong to the "social engineering magazine" and not to the Computer Science publication. Last time I was renewing my membership, I had to sign some kind of a pledge "not to harass people". Are you kidding me? What are we, 12? Because of that, while it's a very important issue, I am very distracted thinking about ACM itself. I guess this is a lesson that reputation and credibility is important. Once you lose it, everything you say, even if it's truly good, gets colored in a certain way.

jll29 5y ago

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jll29 5y ago

One way forward could be to lower the bar for publications. Once it's no longer about being in the esteemed and scarce "10%", they won't bother because they don't need to. Imagine a process where the only criteria are technical soundness and novelty, and as long as minimal standards are met, it's a "go". Call it the "ArXiv + quality check" model. Neither formal acceptance to publish nor citation numbers truly mark scientific excellence; perhaps, winning a "test of time award" does, or appearing in a text book 10 years later. I've been reviewing occasionally since ~1995, regularly since ~2004, and I've never heard of collusion rings happening in my sub-area of CS (ML, IR, NLP). I have caught people submitting to multiple conferences without disclosing it. Ignoring past work that is relevant is common, more often our of blissful ignorance, and occasionally likely with full intent. I'm not saying I doubt the report, but I suspect the bigger problem that CS has is a large percentage of poor-quality work that couldn't be replicated. BTW, the most blantant thing I've heard of (from a contact complaining about it on LinkedIn) is someone had their very own core paper from their PhD thesis plagiarised - submitted to another conference (again) but with different author names on it... and they even cited the real author's PhD thesis!

mycologos 5y ago
> Imagine a process where the only criteria are technical soundness and novelty, and as long as minimal standards are met, it's a "go". Call it the "ArXiv + quality check" model. One possible issue is that researchers usually need to justify their research to somebody who's not in their field. Conferences are one way to do this. So are citation counts. Both are highly imperfect, but outsiders typically want some signal that doesn't require being an expert in a person's chosen field. The "Arxiv + quality check" model doesn't seem to provide this. > I suspect the bigger problem that CS has is a large percentage of poor-quality work that couldn't be replicated. As a sort of ML researcher for several years, I agree.
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago
  As a fellow ML researcher, I want to add that the lack of code along with the publication makes the problem worse.$BIGGROUP gets a paper whose core contribution is a library, published, and yet they haven't released the code 6 months after the conference, effectively claiming credits for something unverifiable.

colour 5y ago

I'm looking forward to when academia actually tumbles down. People like James Burke have been awaiting this for ages.

SquibblesRedux 5y ago
> People like James Burke have been awaiting this for ages. I would like to more about this. Can you point to any interviews or other materials that shed light on Burke's thoughts on academia?
- colour 5y ago
  The conclusion of connections season 1 pretty much is that knowledge needs to made more freely available. He has also held a dozen of long winded talks on the topic like e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvIy52kX-uU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvIy52kX-uU There also exists this quite more concise interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3XoLycc9io https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3XoLycc9io

ravel-bar-foo 5y ago

Sometimes the collusion is blatantly obvious. Back in grad school a colleague of mine spent nine months on an experiment in a new field and submitted it as a paper to a quality journal. Six months later, the paper was rejected for lack of novelty: One of the reviewers had found a paper with a figure-by-figure duplication of the same experiment -- published on arXiv a week before the rejection decision. Both the managing editor and the author on the arXiv paper were from Chinese universities. We wrote a rebuttal and submitted a complaint to the journal editor, but no justice was forthcoming. My colleage switched research directions to avoid the collusion and now takes pains not to submit papers without a coauthor who has enough clout in the field to deter blatant research theft. He also avoids dealing with editors from institutions in China. He ended up graduating two years later than planned.

JoeyBananas 5y ago
that's a good reason to put it papers on arxiv before you submit them
Eridrus 5y ago
The other way to mitigate this is to put your work on ArXiv before submitting it to conferences/journals, which is becoming more and more acceptable in at least some CS sub-fields.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  This is becoming more popular in another field (non-CS) I follow, but for different reasons: Some have been posting their papers to pre-print servers and then skipping straight to commercialization attempts. This is especially concerning in the health and fitness world, where some supplement makers and fitness gurus are uploading documents to pre-print servers to give the illusion of being published authors. Casual observers may not be able to tell the difference between published, peer-reviewed papers and some random document uploaded that has a DOI on a pre-print server. This doesn’t carry much weight in academia, but it can fool non-academic observers. I’m not sure if or how it will translate to CS papers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if skipping peer review becomes more common as the pace of publishing increases.

fouc 5y ago

I just got a 500 response from this link.

argonix 5y ago
try this https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3429776 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3429776

djoldman 5y ago

Backup: https://archive.is/z3szt https://archive.is/z3szt

jvanderbot 5y ago

One side comment: It's true that the focus on publications has made the # of papers go through the roof. On the other hand, I can quickly sift through papers using google scholar, whereas I never could before. For any fact I'm looking into, reams have been written about it. This is, to my experience, a huge boon to writing papers and doing research quickly. This has nothing to do with collusion, but some in this thread are saying that just the number of papers is indicative of a problem.

ajarmst 5y ago

The part I found interesting was that the author notes that it is well-known that the quality of the work has little to do with its odds of acceptance even when the system is 'functioning' as designed. Is it cheating to game a system that is already fundamentally broken? If the quality of your work is inadequate to secure publication and your career depends on it, it wouldn't be very hard to convince yourself that you can't cheat a rigged game. What 'integrity' is actually being threatened? Perhaps some of the energy devoted to identifying these collusion rings would be better spent developing a review process that is at least somewhat biased in favour of good research rather than the density of the authors' professional network. Or at least in mitigating the poisonous 'publish or perish' rules that lead to this sort of phenomena.

mycologos 5y ago
> the author notes that it is well-known that the quality of the work has little to do with its odds of acceptance even when the system is 'functioning' as designed I think this is a little more pessimistic than what the piece says. The NeurIPS (then-NIPS) experiment said that about 60% of papers accepted by one PC got rejected by the other. That doesn't actually mean "the quality of the work has little to do with its odds of acceptance". It may just be that there's a paper has to cross a quality threshold, and once it's past, then the outcome has a lot more variation. My personal take on NeurIPS specifically is that there's a fraction of bad papers, maybe 40%, that probably shouldn't and won't get in. Then there's a minority of very nice papers that probably should and will get in, maybe 5-10%. And then there are a bunch of middling papers where a lot of it is luck and drawing friendly reviewers. But these aren't bad papers, and you can't really just churn them out, they're just not very good papers.
- fulafel 5y ago
  Seems it's also rational for an opportunistic player of the publications game to split their work into the maximal number of marginally acceptable publications, which would result in a high rejection %.
  - 5y ago

bo1024 5y ago

Very sad to hear about this. The top theory conferences are much smaller. Reviewers are usually invited to participate by a committee member who has met them personally or at least knows their body of work. If a low-quality paper was accepted, many people would notice. There are downsides, but the upside is that these kinds of collusion tactics wouldn't have a chance.

javert 5y ago

Many people are proposing "fixes" for this kind of behavior in the comments. Fundamentally, there is no way to fix it, because the system is self-disregulating. In other words, there is no mechanism to bring the academic system back to honesty over time; there is a mechanism to make it more dishonest over time. This is inherent to government solutions. In modern times, democracy was supposed to be the regulating mechanism of the bureaucracy, but obviously isn't working. The bureaucracy itself certainly is disregulatory. Modern academia is simply an organ of the larger government bureaucracy.

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tragiclos 5y ago

While this practice is certainly bad, it seems like an inevitable consequence of rating professional development based on publication in specific journals. Perhaps if they were evaluated based on the feedback of their manager and coworkers, as in other fields, this would be less of an issue.

nomoreplease 5y ago

I wonder how many other conferences have this same collusion going on. I remember reading a similar story years ago for anthropology/sociology/pedagogy (cannot remember which)

joe_the_user 5y ago

It's worth noting some context: - Conferences and participants have increased exponentially over the last few years. - Students in AI/ML graduate programs have similarly increased. - Huge numbers of companies are hiring AI/ML graduates. - What constitutes a true advance AI/ML is difficult to determine. Deep learning is fairly ad-hoc method - a tweak to an existing method that allows you exceed soto (state of the art) is the simplest way to get attention. But that's not a method and so you're many others pushing similar tweaks also. This environment in particular seems like it would exacerbate all the ordinary pressures to cheat found in the academic environment. It has something of the quality of the last blow-out of a bubble. And the thing is that even with deep learning being real, the dynamics seem fated to push things to the point that expectation are sufficiently far past reality that the whole collapses, for a bit.

known 5y ago

This collusion is prevalent among Brahmin caste in South Asia since 700 BC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism)

machinelearning 5y ago

The same cartel in each sub field follows you from conference to conference too. I’ve seen often that these people bid for the papers in a particular subfield and get assigned to the paper that they rejected in the previous conference. I’ve seen two reviewers give the exact same review at two different conferences even though the paper had incorporated the changes from the previous one. Thankfully the AC was receptive to the concerns raised by the author and the paper was accepted.

randomsearch 5y ago

This is a bit surprising, but hardly the biggest problem. I’ve posted before about it, but academic has to get away from the infantilism of using KPIs to judge creative intellectual work. Part of the problem is that people seem to want an objective evaluation of a piece of research, and measure the value for taxpayer money. Well, you can’t get an objective evaluation. It’s all subjective. And “impact” as a quantifiable entity in general is nonsense, for one thing the timescales prohibit its measurement at the point where it may be useful. The solution is to use management. Lots of people object here and say “but nepotism, favouritism” and yep that’s a problem, but it is less of a problem that the decline of western universities. You can circumvent it somewhat by rotation, by involving external figures, by a hierarchy that ensures people are not colluding, but ultimately you just have to trust people and accept some wastage. People aren’t in academia for the money. It’s a vocation. You’re not going to have many people milking the system. Things went pretty well before the metric culture invaded the academy. They can go well again.

pfortuny 5y ago
This is a laudable opinion BUT. (Speaking about Spain). The KPIs are there because OFFICIALLY (and this is strictly so) you are not even allowed to get a tenured position without an absurd number of (in Maths) JCR papers IN THE FIRST QUARTILE. This is so stupid it is not even funny but how can you fight that when your PhD students depend on those metrics?
- dheera 5y ago
  Personally I think we need to do away with tenure. Academic institutions should just hire good researchers as employees and do good research. There was a time in history when tenure made sense, but today the tenure track process forces a lot of people to go after low-hanging fruit that has a high probability of being accepted for publication, instead of trying things that are meaningful to try but may fail.
  - pfortuny 5y ago
    That is precisely why tenure is important: you can think without time pressures.

seibelj 5y ago

HN is so funny - here is a thread where I tried to articulate how incredibly broken the academic system is, and tons of HN academics claimed it was perfect and downvoted me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27242576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27242576 I guess the system is inherently broken after all?

jorgBaller 5y ago

Right wing computer scientists always keep talking about collisions. Why can't they write better papers? If they did, the papers would be accepted for sure

gher-shyu3i 5y ago

This isn't surprising, and it isn't limited to CS research. I've known people who got papers in different fields because of a similar approach. It's also noteworthy that it seems that Chinese engage in this quite a bit, either due to their culture that does not forbid cheating (e.g. see how they pass the GRE or other standard tests) or because there are a lot of them.

ritmatter 5y ago

Serious question: why are paper authors allowed to be reviewers at all? That seems like the main logistical issue in this review process.

ritmatter 5y ago

Why are paper authors able to also act as reviewers? This seems to be a big part of the problem. Is there a lack of topical experts?

bo1024 5y ago
Yes. A large fraction of the experts are submitting to the same most-prestigious conferences every year.

tpoacher 5y ago

Also known as the Lance Armstrong principle.

rcpt 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."