[HN Gopher] Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer archi...
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Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture
conferences
Author : bmc7505
Score : 182 points
Date : 2020-06-08 19:41 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| yutopia wrote:
| Academia has become tremendously cutthroat but it still operates
| under the assumption that everyone acts honorably.
|
| Perhaps that's no longer sustainable, but what is the solution?
| Many of the problems with modern-day academic research can be
| traced back to increased scale and competition, neither of which
| is going away.
| obvthrowaway2 wrote:
| I have always imagined higher level academia would be rife with
| inner circle politics (corruption).
| winstonschmidt wrote:
| "higher level X would be rife with inner circle politics" -
| sadly seems to be in line with human nature.
|
| FWIW, anecdotally, in my interactions with academia involved
| parties have mostly been surprisingly respectable - which is
| more that I can say for industry.
| p0llard wrote:
| Does anyone know which other SIG is implicated? Or where I might
| be able to find out?
| jjjjjj__ wrote:
| Fraud?
|
| Are you kidding me? I have publication in MICRO with a very
| famous institution in US. (Top 20).
|
| You know how my professor published his paper in MICRO?
| Relationship! Relationship! Relationship!
|
| As a graduate student coming from a third world country, I
| totally lost my hope on the system when I saw a venue as famous
| as MICRO, is only based on relationship.
|
| Don't judge me, who can I report it? I am graduate student, means
| losing my supervisor means losing my visa. I am even posting this
| via anonymous account (thats how scared I am).
| codezero wrote:
| That's a huge bummer. When I was doing research in physics, I
| found it easy to get published, even without having a PhD -
| though it didn't hurt, I think, to be working at a university
| with a group that had already published in that publication
| before.
|
| With that said, my PIs didn't assist me at all in preparing,
| submitting, or defending my research, except to inform me of
| what to prepare for.
|
| I was really pleased with that whole experience because it felt
| like there were very distinctly _not_ gatekeepers in that
| field. It could very easily be that there are not really any
| professional stakes in the field I studied in, so maybe that
| makes a difference.
|
| My team was all researchers, not tenured faculty, and we funded
| ourselves with government grants.
|
| With all that said, it's really helpful to get a different
| point of view - thanks for sharing this, and sorry for the
| trouble you experienced, nobody should be put in such an
| awkward position.
| jjjjjj__ wrote:
| I am thinking about applying again from the beginning and
| start Ph.D. all over. Since I am in love with science.
|
| And the only reason I left my home country was because I
| _wanted_ pursue science. (Science is what makes my love
| beautiful)
|
| But I am afraid maybe my next supervisor will be same (let
| alone if I leave middle way my current supervisor will not
| give me letter of recommendation).
| rscho wrote:
| You are right to be afraid. Get your PhD. first, then do
| what you want and try to do honest research if you still
| feel like it. It's like that in every field, apparently.
| I've been doing medical research for 10 years and I have
| yet to meet a honest professor. But with time, I got more
| independent and while I still have to put up with
| professoral bullshit I now also can conduct honest and
| independent projects from time to time.
| jjjjjj__ wrote:
| Thank you for those kind words. I really needed it. A
| honest person to talk too.
|
| You can imagine how much of a shock it is to my believe
| system to come from literally other side of the world, in
| hope of doing genuine research, and turns out, it is
| based on lies.
| codezero wrote:
| I ended up dropping out of graduate school, but the
| advice I was given before entering was this:
|
| Choose your advisor, not your area of focus.
|
| Your advisor single-handedly decides how smoothly your
| PhD will go, and once you have your PhD, you can decide
| where your career goes.
|
| Obviously, area of focus does determine a bit of your
| future, but within that area, optimize for a helpful
| advisor.
|
| Also, I am sure your university has resources, and ways
| you could report this behavior, but it's often very
| difficult to unseat/challenge university faculty, so I
| totally understand an unwillingness to act. I agree with
| the other commenter: finish what you started, get out,
| and focus on doing good work.
| glangdale wrote:
| Don't do this! Try to do the best research you can. When
| you are make your own way as a researcher you can learn
| from this bad experience and conduct yourself with more
| integrity. Once you have a post PhD job what you did during
| your thesis won't matter, to be honest - 10 years on people
| will judge you by your more recent publications.
|
| So don't get off track - changing schools/advisers/topics
| can be very disruptive and you can wind up becoming a
| tenured ("ten-yeared") graduate student. I was forced to
| change advisor due to my first one leaving and it took me
| from 'on track to get out quickly' to 'slowest guy in my
| year to finish'.
| wmf wrote:
| In your opinion was your paper good enough to be in MICRO?
|
| It's kind of sad, but I think even good science needs help to
| be seen.
| jjjjjj__ wrote:
| Not at all. The idea maybe was good (in long term with solid
| work). But none of our code were working, or works right now
| for that matter. Nothing _works_. And I am not saying they
| does not work as research codes tend to be ugly. I am saying
| that in _literal_ sense of the word.
|
| It was totally wishful story glued together with beautiful
| sentences, published via a serious relationship in MICRO.
|
| There are sentences in that paper which even I don't or my
| professor understand. It has been written in that way!
|
| 1) Write in a way that nobody understands,
|
| 2) use big words, (put them in beautiful sentences, so nobody
| would have any doubts, particularly in introduction and
| beginning of the paper and in conclusion).
|
| 3) a relationship inside MICRO.
|
| Wow you have published a paper in MICRO now.
| topspin wrote:
| "Conclusion: 99.99% of us are honest but the dishonest 0.01% can
| cause serious, repeated damage."
|
| Precisely how is this ratio determined?
|
| Given the unreproducable results and plagiarism that we've
| learned about in recent times I believe there is a lot more fraud
| than can be accounted for by "the dishonest 0.01%."
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I think the same. I mean, it's widely known that academic
| incentives are completely broken all across the board. And yet
| somehow those broken incentives are _not_ producing dishonest
| research at scale? Doesn 't add up, really.
| withinrafael wrote:
| The paper file listing [1] from the PC in question shows
| predictable [conference][year]-paper[incrementing-number] file
| name pattern. Rather than "insider help" [2], could this be
| explained via a "leaky endpoint/api" that got scraped?
|
| I hope I'm missing something.
|
| [1]
| https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*sNC6SuC1v8peYmw6KEcz3g.pn...
|
| [2] Quote: "HotCRP does not show you your own submission even if
| you are a PC member, so how did the de-anonymized reviews and PC
| comments for Huixiang's paper end up in his laptop? An insider
| help seems likely."
| lazyjeff wrote:
| It's possible, but there are only a few reviewing systems that
| are commonly used and their permission systems are robust as
| far as I know. I think a simpler explanation is that someone in
| the fraud group has a "higher permission role" than a first-
| line reviewer, so has access to these. This could be someone
| who is a general chair, program committee chair, track chair or
| area chair if the conference is big enough, and often even
| senior PC members (the metareviewers). All they have to do is
| perform an export and put it on Dropbox or Google Drive.
| DenisM wrote:
| Certain news and social media sites have expertise in detecting
| voting rings. Maybe they could help...
| kleiba wrote:
| In a time when the main purpose of a conference were academic
| exchange and moving forward a scientific field, there was little
| incentive to engage in fraud. When, as is standard practice
| today, your scientific career hinges on how many papers you
| published at top venues, the story changes drastically.
|
| Accounts of how groups of inter-connected high-profile
| researchers game the review system for their own advantage are
| deeply concerning.
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| This is really sad for a great community like SIGARCH. They need
| to clean up; rather, they are sweeping things under the rug.
| Let's hope other communities can learn from their mistakes.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Is there a summary of what the fraud was about? Was it about
| publishing certain researchers' work?
|
| EDIT: Thanks, I skimmed too much.
| YetAnotherMatt wrote:
| > There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets
| work on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any
| papers with each other so as to keep out of each other's
| conflict lists (to the extent that even if there is
| collaboration they voluntarily give up authorship on one paper
| to prevent conflicts on many future papers). They exchange
| papers before submissions and then either bid or get assigned
| to review each other's papers by virtue of having expertise on
| the topic of the papers. They give high scores to the papers.
| If a review raises any technical issues in PC discussions, the
| usual response is something to the effect that despite the
| issues they still remain positive; or if a review questions the
| novelty claims, they point to some minor detail deep in the
| paper and say that they find that detail to be novel even
| though the paper itself does not elevate that detail to claim
| novelty. Our process is not set up to combat such collusion.
|
| Verbatim from the article.
| [deleted]
| pvarangot wrote:
| This behavior should be particularly unacceptable in computer
| science journals. One of the main results computer science give
| to society is creating secure systems to protect and exchange
| information, and the fact that a double blind peer review system
| for a conference that basically deals with the construction of
| safe reliable systems was broken shouldn't be taken lightly.
| rscho wrote:
| Come see what's happening in medicine and be really appalled...
| protomyth wrote:
| I do wonder if medicine can compete with the various
| conferences in support of social service programs?
| jedberg wrote:
| The bigger question is, what do we do about it?
|
| It's inevitable that when you do research on a very niche topic,
| you'll probably know a lot of people who are qualified to review
| your paper.
|
| How do we prevent this kind of corruption when the communities
| are so small?
| tomato2juice wrote:
| Looks like the (sad) background story is here :
| https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/the-hidden-story-behind-th...
|
| Posting here instead of a new submission
| codezero wrote:
| Wow sounds like that was the tip of the iceberg. Super tragic.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| If someone behaves like the mentoring professor did, they
| aren't a mentor, they are a crux bringing you down. Burn
| their reputation, your life is worth more than their
| "research".
|
| I do understand the pressure this person was feeling,
| unfortunately they didn't see a way out.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| This is incredibly sad. I'm not familiar with academic
| research, was the option to withdraw the paper before
| publication not available?
| loeg wrote:
| His mentor (one of those involved in this fraud) refused to
| withdraw the paper, according to the translated messages with
| friends from the same link above.
| anjc wrote:
| It isn't up to his mentor to withdraw a paper for which he
| isn't the first author. It doesn't even require a
| retraction as it wouldn't be published yet, albeit,
| withdrawing is still frowned upon
| znpy wrote:
| There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets work
| on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any papers
| with each other so as to keep out of each other's conflict lists
| (to the extent that even if there is collaboration they
| voluntarily give up authorship on one paper to prevent
| conflicts on many future papers)
|
| is this normal ?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Looking at the screenshots ... "video recognition in future 5G
| technology". Is that just straight up word salad? It sounds like
| the industry horseshit I hear in snippets ... "the convergence of
| machine learning and IoT". Does the phrase "video recognition in
| future 5G technology" have _any_ meaning whatsoever?
| rshnotsecure wrote:
| This was a long time coming. A quick look at the historical DNS
| records for IEEE.org shows there have been strange things going
| on for some time.
|
| Recently, OpenSSL unveiled a new "notification" policy that gave
| massive preference to Huawei and Smartisans [1]. They are
| OpenSSL's largest donors. The process by how this was done was
| kind of laughably deceptive, which of course aroused further
| suspicion.
|
| Many things have yet to be revealed likely. I hope more
| individuals come forward.
|
| [1] - https://blog.12security.com/openssl-expands-partnership-
| with...
| [deleted]
| pphysch wrote:
| Please keep the sinophobia out of HN. Thanks.
| codezero wrote:
| They seem to summarize it in paragraph four, though I am not
| clear on what this really means - I think it is that certain
| authors are able to be "top ranked" and get limited review from
| colluding peers who may also be co-authors on the paper, but
| removed themselves to squeeze through review faster and avoid
| future flags for "conflict of interest"
|
| _" There is a chat group of a few dozen authors who in subsets
| work on common topics and carefully ensure not to co-author any
| papers with each other so as to keep out of each other's conflict
| lists (to the extent that even if there is collaboration they
| voluntarily give up authorship on one paper to prevent conflicts
| on many future papers). They exchange papers before submissions
| and then either bid or get assigned to review each other's papers
| by virtue of having expertise on the topic of the papers. They
| give high scores to the papers. If a review raises any technical
| issues in PC discussions, the usual response is something to the
| effect that despite the issues they still remain positive; or if
| a review questions the novelty claims, they point to some minor
| detail deep in the paper and say that they find that detail to be
| novel even though the paper itself does not elevate that detail
| to claim novelty. Our process is not set up to combat such
| collusion."_
|
| Also see the link in a sibling comment for what seems to have
| kicked this all off:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460336
| currymj wrote:
| peer review at CS conferences is normally anonymous and double-
| blind to reviewers and authors. however, the conference
| organizers themselves know who the reviewers and authors are,
| and the conference management websites are set up to avoid
| assigning reviewers to papers where they have a conflict of
| interest with the author.
|
| this is usually something like: anyone whose email address has
| the same domain as yours, plus anyone you have coauthored any
| paper with, both of these going back a few years. If you are
| ethical you will report any additional conflicts that this
| doesn't catch.
|
| so if a cabal wants to make sure they can positively review
| each others papers, they have to make sure they don't trip
| those automated filters. this means they must have been at
| separate institutions for a while, and must avoid publishing
| any papers together.
|
| then, during the review process, they can "bid on" (put
| themselves forward as a reviewer for) each other's papers and
| ensure they give only positive reviews.
| justicezyx wrote:
| > peer review at CS conferences is normally anonymous and
| double-blind to reviewers and authors
|
| Really? When I was doing my PhD from 2008-2012, double blind
| conferences on computer systems and networking usually
| reveals the authors.
|
| Although double blindness is not perfect:
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1517480.1517492 (Double-
| Blind Reviewing -- More Placebo Than Miracle Cure?)
| the_svd_doctor wrote:
| In small fields, it's sometimes really not very hard to guess
| who are the authors, just given the topic and what papers
| they cite. Even with double blind.
| [deleted]
| qznc wrote:
| You can often guess who the reviewers are as well. The most
| obvious tell is "also cite paper X" which is their own 99%
| of the time.
| lazyjeff wrote:
| I don't think this is true from my experience. I've been
| on several program committees, and have managed a couple
| as well. Usually if you're above the first-level
| reviewers (e.g. senior PC, track chair, PC chair), you
| can see the actual author names and reviewers.
|
| Most of the time when an author later says (formally
| through the review system, or informally in casual
| conversation) that "I know it's this reviewer who asked
| me to cite their own paper" they are wrong. Their main
| evidence is that the reviewer asked them to cite two
| papers that include the same author.
|
| But of course I can't tell them otherwise because of the
| confidentiality, so they keep on believing that,
| perpetuating the myth. Perhaps someone can aggregate some
| statistics on this, but I genuinely believe that authors
| suggesting their own papers only about 20% of the time,
| and when they do it's because their paper was highly
| relevant.
| ska wrote:
| I agree, in my experience the request to add citations is
| usually because there is fairly obvious context missing,
| and the reviewer wants to make the connection/comparison
| is made. Sometimes it's the authors own papers, but
| that's selection bias at work - if they didn't work in
| the area, they probably wouldn't be reviewing it.
| xenonite wrote:
| "Please update the references to include recent
| literature" sometimes makes it clear, too.
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