Thursday, April 14, 2005
A new labor-saving device courtesy of those wacky MIT kids!
It seems that some scientific conferences have higher standards for their academic submissions than others. Jeremy Stribling and two of his fellow MIT students wrote a computer program that generates nonsensical scientific articles using random text and diagram generators.
Stribling describes one of the motivations for their program in his website:
"One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to "fake" conferences; that is, conferences with no quality standards, which exist only to make money."
Of several such papers submitted to one such conference, one entitled Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy was accepted. The team is currently attempting to raise funds so they can travel and formally present their computer-generated findings at the WMSCI 2005 meeting.
Stribling maintains a website whereby readers can generate their own scholarly papers for fun and profit.
Perhaps minimal modifications to his program can extend its usefulness to mainstream journalism?
Stribling describes one of the motivations for their program in his website:
"One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to "fake" conferences; that is, conferences with no quality standards, which exist only to make money."
Of several such papers submitted to one such conference, one entitled Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy was accepted. The team is currently attempting to raise funds so they can travel and formally present their computer-generated findings at the WMSCI 2005 meeting.
Stribling maintains a website whereby readers can generate their own scholarly papers for fun and profit.
Perhaps minimal modifications to his program can extend its usefulness to mainstream journalism?
