The emperor's new clothes

Check out SCIgen, an Automatic CS Paper Generator. It's the brainchild of three MIT students who wrote it to generate papers for academic conferences "complete with 'context-free grammar,' charts and diagrams." But the best part is, one of these bogus papers--"Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy"--got accepted for presentation at the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

Nagib Callaos, a conference organizer, said the paper was one of a small number accepted on a "non-reviewed" basis -- meaning that reviewers had not yet given their feedback by the acceptance deadline.

"We thought that it might be unfair to refuse a paper that was not refused by any of its three selected reviewers," Callaos wrote in an e-mail. "The author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility of the content of their paper."

However, Callaos said conference organizers were reviewing their acceptance procedures in light of the hoax.

Here's a small portion of the paper I was able to generate. I'm particularly pleased with the diagram.

Contrasting the Turing Machine and Scatter/Gather I/O with Pod

Abstract
Cryptographers agree that game-theoretic technology are an interesting new topic in the field of operating systems, and security experts concur. In this work, we disconfirm the construction of the Internet.
...

Our research is principled. Along these same lines, we estimate that omniscient information can observe the development of A* search without needing to investigate consistent hashing. Along these same lines, we assume that virtual machines can prevent link-level acknowledgements without needing to simulate the deployment of the location-identity split. We use our previously simulated results as a basis for all of these assumptions. This is a private property of Pod.


Figure 1: A schematic plotting the relationship between our approach and object-oriented languages.

Anyone who's been to library school recently, particularly if you've taken courses on the "information-science" side of the field can appreciate SCIgen. I'm pretty sure I could have gotten an A with this paper. Not that it was that hard to get an A using my own context-free grammar. Wait a second. I take that back. It requires more training and diligent application to write this poorly.

Via Pejman.