Automatic computer-science research paper generator

[AdamSmith]

Somewhat hilarious.

SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator

About Generate Examples Talks Code Donations Related People Blog

About

SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check out the very broad conference description on the WMSCI 2005 website). There's also a list of known bogus conferences. Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end. In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005! See Examples for more details.

We went to WMSCI 2005. Check out the talks and video. You can find more details in our blog.

Generate a Random Paper

Want to generate a random CS paper of your own? Type in some optional author names below, and click "Generate".

Author 1:
Author 2:
Author 3:
Author 4:
Author 5:

SCIgen currently supports Latin-1 characters, but not the full Unicode character set.

Examples

Here are two papers we submitted to WMSCI 2005:

• Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy (PS, PDF)
  Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn
  
  This paper was accepted as a "non-reviewed" paper!
  • Acceptance e-mail
  • A strange follow-up email, along with our response
  • Anthony Liekens sent an inquiry to WMSCI about this situation, and received this response, with an amazing letter (PS, PDF) attached. (Also check out Jeff Erickson's in-depth deconstruction of this letter.)
  • With the many generous donations we received, we paid one conference registration fee of $390.
  • Our registration fee was refunded. See above for the next phase of our plan.

  We received many donations to send us to the conference, so that we can give a randomly-generated talk.
  

• The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking (PS, PDF)
  Thomer M. Gil
  
  

  For some reason, this paper was rejected. We asked for reviews, and got this response.

Talks

Thanks to the generous donations of 165 people, we went to WMSCI 2005 in Orlando and held our own "technical" session in the same hotel. The (randomly-generated) title of the session was The 6th Annual North American Symposium on Methodologies, Theory, and Information. The session included three randomly-generated talks:

• Harnessing Byzantine Fault Tolerance Using Classical Theory
  Dr. Thaddeus Westerson, Institute for Human Understanding (Max)
• Synthesizing Checksums and Lambda Calculus using Jog
  Dr. Mark Zarqawi, American Freedom University (Jeremy)
• On the Study of the Ethernet
  Franz T. Shenkrishnan, PhD, Network Analysis Laboratories (Dan)

As promised, we videotaped the whole thing. You can download the resulting movie, titled Near Science, below. Movie length: 13:15.

• High quality (AVI: 88 MB, RealMedia: 65 MB):
  Download AVI | Download RM
  Bit Torrent AVI
  AVI Mirrors: MIT (MA) | CMU (PA) | Brown (RI)
  RM Mirrors: MIT (MA) | CMU (PA) | Brown (RI)
• Medium quality (AVI: 48 MB, RealMedia: 42MB):
  Download AVI | Download RM
  Bit Torrent AVI
  Coral cache AVI | Coral cache RM
  AVI Mirrors: MIT (MA) | CMU (PA) | Brown (RI)
  RM Mirrors: MIT (MA) | CMU (PA) | Brown (RI)
• Low quality (AVI: 20 MB, RealMedia: 9 MB):
  Download AVI | Download RM
  Bit Torrent AVI
  Coral cache AVI | Coral cache RM
  AVI Mirrors: MIT (MA) | CMU (PA) | Brown (RI)
  RM Mirrors: MIT (MA) | CMU (PA) | Brown (RI)

Trouble playing the AVI? Try downloading a DivX codec for Windows or Mac, or try the open source VideoLAN player.

You can read more about the trip here, and check out some pictures here.

Many thanks to everyone who made this possible, especially Tadd Torborg and family, Open Clipart, the PDOS research group, and of course all the SCIgen donors.

Code

The code for SCIgen is released under GPL, and is currently available via anonymous CVS.

% cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.pdos.csail.mit.edu:/cvs login Logging in to :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.pdos.csail.mit.edu:2401/cvsCVS password: _press return_% cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.pdos.csail.mit.edu:/cvs co -P scigen

We're still working on documentation and making it more user-friendly, but you should be able to figure most of it out from the code. Here's what you need on your computer to run it (we've run it on FreeBSD and GNU/Linux platforms):

• Perl
• LaTeX/BibTeX
• Gnuplot
• GraphViz

If you would like to contribute code to this project (i.e., by helping us expand our context-free grammar with more sentences, nouns, etc.), please contact us with any patches and we'll apply them if they seem reasonable. We hope to set up a better system sometime in the near future.

Running the code. We've been getting a lot of questions about how to run the code. There are quite a few misleading files in the source -- sorry about that. All you need to do to generate a paper is to run make-latex.pl (also look at make-latex.pl --help). You can also use scigen.pl to generate any arbitrary starting target. See scirules.in for most of the grammar rules.

Donations

As indicated above, one of our generated papers got accepted to WMSCI 2005. Our plan was to go there and give a completely randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face. However, this is very expensive for grad students such as ourselves. So, we asked visitors to this site to make small donations toward this dream of ours; the response was overwhelming.

Amount of donations: $2401.43 (after PayPal fees)
Number of donations: 165
Amount of time: 72 hours

We used this money to hold our own session at the same hotel as WMSCI 2005.

Related Work

Other papers:

• Another fantastic submission to SCI 2005, by David Mazières and Eddie Kohler
• Alan Sokal's brilliant hoax article (i.e., the Social Text Affair)
• Researchers in Vienna take down the VIDEA conference
• Justin Zobel raises some questions about the validity of SCI

Other generators:

• gzzt.org's list of the best online generators
• The Dada Engine, another tool that generates random text from context-free grammars
• List of text generators from elsewhere.org (on the right)
• Barath Raghavan's Systems Topic Generator
• An essay generator
• SBIR grant proposal generator
• We initially based SCIgen on Chris Coyne's grammar for high school papers; Chris is now making neat pictures with context-free grammars.

Other SCIgen successes:

• Philip Davis got a paper accepted to the Open Information Science Journal.
• Peter Trifonov got a random paper accepted to the GESTS journal.
• Mikhail Gelfand and the Troitsky Variant newspaper published Rooter in Russian in a nationally accredited Russian scientific journal.
• "Herbert Schlangemann" got a SCIgen paper accepted to the IEEE CSSE 2008 conference.
• Students at Sharif University in Iran got a paper accepted by the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation.
• Mathias Ulsar got a paper accepted to the IPSI-BG conference.
• Professor Genco Gülan published a paper in the 3rd International Symposium of Interactive Media Design.

People

We are graduate students in the PDOS research group at MIT CSAIL.

• Jeremy Stribling
• Max Krohn
• Dan Aguayo

Contact us at this email address: scigen-dev at the domain pdos.csail.mit.edu

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

[Lucky]

Now we know how Adam smith is able to post as much as he does. Auto-generation while he auto-stimulates.

[AdamSmith]

Busted!

[MsGuy]

LOL, after many (ok--two) attempts to decipher Professor Calaos's statement of his organization's methodology, I'm wondering if the good professor has devised a content free grammar based automatic writing program for his own use.

"Our methodological strategy will be a systemic, not a systematic one. To organize the editorial process and to manage the publishing operational activities will be done with an open, adaptable and evolutionary methodological system. It will have the flexibility required to adapt the journal, its editorial policy, its organizational process and its management to the dynamics of its related areas and disciplines, to changes produced by the inherent learning process involved, and to the uncertainty of the environment. It would be a matter of applying Ashby’s Requisite Variety principle, concepts related to Prigogine’s dissipative structures and other basic principles found in General Systems Theory, General Systems Methodology and Cybernetics. Consequently, we will not have a deterministic and a completely pre-conceived systematic editorial methodology, nor completely pre-determined and static editorial policy, but, in both cases, they will be open, flexible, adaptable and evolutionary. "

[Lucky]

I cannot understand what this is all about, other than some auto-generating plan for college students to get their papers written and in on time.

[MsGuy]

Lucky, some years back a guy by the name of Alan Socal submitted (and had accepted ) a completely nonsense paper to a respectable literary journal. The paper, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" , was stuffed higgledy piggledly with whatever academic buzz words and concepts were fashionable in literary criticism at the time. Shit storm and much hilarity ensued as left wing feminist theory borrows heavily from this particular school of thought (or non-thought).

See the second link above under "other papers" toward the end of the other post.

Socal's paper was addressing what he saw as wooly-headed intellectual fraud in academia whereas the paper AS is posting about really is more about a finantial scam run by some ex prof who basically pretends to run a legitimate scientific journal but accepts all papers submitted on payment of his "editorial" fees. He preys on post grads and junior academic types desperate to publish a paper.

[AdamSmith]

As footnote to MsGuy's A+ exegesis (honorarium is in the mail ), Sokal's aim was to burlesque the wilder applications of social construction theory (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism), reasonable enough at base (arguably) but which has gotten way out of bounds and metastasized into a pathology warping many aspects of academic inquiry where it has no business. See Critique section in the Wikipedia article, and more extended vivisections such as The Social Construction of What? http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0674004124

The tie-in to the MIT computer scientists' satirical project is that even their discipline has become infected by the clotted mode of discourse spawned by the social constructionists. Who themselves picked up some of their worst habits from post-structuralist and deconstructionist theorists, q.v. (Almost all of whom were French. Except for one of the worst, who was Belgian. Hmm...)

[MsGuy]

Almost all of whom were French. Except for one of the worst, who was Belgian. Hmm...

I'll bet he was a Belgian of the Walloon persuasion.

A Frog is a Frog is a Frog even if he holds a Belgian passport.

[AdamSmith]

Hah!

It was Paul de Man (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_de_Man). Whose classes I took at Jale. Which might explain things.

[MsGuy]

And the band plays on.

More than 120 scientific and engineering papers have had to be withdrawn by publishers after Cyril Lobbe of Fourier University developed a program to automatically detect papers written by gibberish generator SCIgen.

You'd think someone would have figured this out by now.

[AdamSmith]

Besides the gaping hole in peer review, another point that struck me is the article's note that most of these papers were first accepted by conferences held in China. From myself getting more and more invites to come speak at professional events in China -- usually in nice coastal cities, in nice hotels -- I see the Chinese have caught on to the lucre to be made from the conference biz.

Even as a speaker at any of these things, I would have to pay the registration fee (usually US$500-1000 -- quite unlike many Western events where speakers are given free admission). And of course pay for my hotel room, for which the conf organizer gets a commission from the hotel. These programs usually get just enough legitimate speakers, lured by the nice vacation and paid for by their employer which doesn't know the difference, to offset the lightweights (to be charitable) who fill most of the speaking slots. Close to the human equivalent of those fraudulent papers.

[lookin]

Hmm. AdamSmith is not here yet.

. .. Oh, my! The Conference is starting already.

What's the title of his paper? . . .

'Economic Removal of Twinks From The Web'

[RA1]

I didn't realize that AS was a "twink spider" but I suppose all things are possible.

I, too, have been invited to functions where I would get a plaque or document suitable for framing and it would ONLY cost me hundreds or maybe low thousands to attend. PT Barnum lives.

Best regards,

RA1

[MsGuy]

I had a friend who was invited to have herself listed in something called "Who's Who in American Academia" or some such. Only cost a couple of hundred bucks.

I got the giggles when she bragged to me about it; she got highly offended, lol, and I back tracked and tried to explain it was a scam.

Not much luck with that effort. She wanted to believe she was being recognized & honored for her outstanding academic work, so believe it she did. Silly woman believed in gypsy fortune tellers too and lit candles to a little statue of St. Jude (patron saint of lost causes among other things). And got really loud when she felt you had crossed her (did I forget to mention she was 1/2 Sicilian?).

I just shut up. It was only a couple hundred dollars and it made her happy. Besides she was a good cook and I liked being invited over to eat.

[lookin]

I just shut up. It was only a couple hundred dollars and it made her happy. Besides she was a good cook and I liked being invited over to eat.

You might want to slip a little to the dog first.

[MsGuy]

Naw, I just pretended to change my mind & let her think she had persuaded me the publication was legit. Wasn't hard 'cause she wanted to believe that too.

I'll put up with a lot if you make good pasta.

[AdamSmith]

I'll put up with a lot if you make good pasta.

Just be careful, is all we're saying.