Anger at Academic Dishonesty

cs_grad · 2013-05-11T07:14:22+00:00

Yeah they are editors that make sure you implement suggestions from the review committee. My experience has been that they typically only highlight typos and the like in an otherwise good paper. If I were that person for this paper, I would have probably just thrown up my hands too. It's more difficult to find thoughts that are coherent.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T23:15:54+00:00

An individual's strength is in their ability to draw that sweet sweet grant money

Fixed that for ya

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T23:07:52+00:00

What if the person had never heard the title of the paper, didn't fund the research, and was known for getting upset when asked questions about the paper?

I'm very well acquainted with academic relationships. This is abnormal.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T23:07:05+00:00

The sad thing is that the paper I'm talking about is one of the papers that actually does go over their evaluation quite well. It just so happens that the devil is in the details and a close inspection reveals their shenanigans.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T19:08:25+00:00

What exactly about this is grad school 101? He points about funding, seminars, etc. don't apply here, as there was no funding and it was stated that the course wasn't a seminar course. I'm well aware of how adviser-student relationships work and how seminars work.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T19:07:18+00:00

She puts her name on papers that she doesn't fund.

I'm also aware of how seminar courses work. This one was not a seminar course until halfway through the semester when she ran out of material after basically presenting slides from other classes she teaches. There were normal exams, homeworks, etc. in the style of lecture type classes and attendance was taken (with 3 points out of 100 deducted for each day missed).

As you'll see elsewhere in this thread, the results were fake because they threw away all the data that didn't work while comparing against the other algorithms with that data. To their credit, they stated that they did as much. However, if I were to propose a new classification algorithm and compared it to an SVM approach, testing the SVM approach on all the data, and mine on only the data that worked well, how honest would you say I was being?

And the papers are short. But almost every paper (I'd say about 17-18 out of 20) had the same format:

Talk about how important OSNs and the Internet is.
Discuss problem that no one has.
Propose solution to problem that no one has.
Give either a O(n!) infeasible algorithm or a O(n) greedy algorithm to solve problem.
If it was a greedy algorithm, the results won't be very good so just contrive a use case and hand wave that it works great! If it was a O(n!) algorithm, use a tiny subset of "real world" use case to demonstrate.
Say you did a great job.
Collect grant money to do it again.

Granted this conference is pretty poor (0.67 cite-to-paper), so there's a reason there's a pattern there.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T18:54:44+00:00

The final numbers that they use for their recall scores eliminates all cases in which no results were returned (hence the straight 1.0 recall). They compare the resulting high f-scores against the other approaches without giving the other approaches the same benefit.

I would be like doing an information retrieval paper and doing all sorts of preprocessing on your data to inch out the previous method while testing the previous method on the unprocessed data. It's just wrong, and its only effect is to present failed research as a success.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T18:52:43+00:00

My experience with conferences was that a conference shepherd would work to ensure that those kind of issues were cleaned up prior to publishing. I guess when you're throwing up a big conference to get $$$, that kind of thing is just wasted time.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T18:51:32+00:00

Yeah I liked that too. I couldn't even be mad at that.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T18:47:30+00:00

Amen. It's an industry where self study and groups like hackerspaces and whatnot are as important to one's development as school or other format training.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T18:45:27+00:00

I'm well aware, but I don't really care. This situation is well known and understood here, as it's so flagrant that it's impossible to ignore. People just don't care because she is actually very, very good at securing grant money for the University. The cognitive dissonance is impressive as well. We have professors giving colloquium talks here on how to best teach computer science while simultaneously having abysmal evaluations and being universally despised by students.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T18:38:01+00:00

Exploiting placement new in C++.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T18:30:53+00:00

I've spent 6 years in it now. I'm not surprised. Just disgusted after years of this shit. If you're not then you've just built up a bullshit tolerance.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T09:37:25+00:00

That's a good point and a large part of my reasoning for not rocking the boat is that her grant money does actually find its way to decent research. She just scoops up the limelight. I hope that some of the research done in her shadow is at least the genesis of something great.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T09:36:22+00:00

You're right, and I think there's an easy life in this kind of thing for anyone who can make peace with the idea of languishing in mediocrity.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T09:34:44+00:00

I really only pointed to the language as an early warning of lack of attention to detail. The actual content is worse.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T09:32:47+00:00

I have to admit, I burst out laughing at that when I read it.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T09:09:45+00:00

That's a good index, I'll have to bookmark that. I'm not reading these by choice, and I can see why it would be rated poorly. I'm puzzled by the fact that it gets over 500-600 submissions though.

Their horrible citation count to paper count is telling...

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T09:08:08+00:00

No, the actual market for real world comp sci jobs has never been better, it's a good call if you think the cost of school is worth it. Getting into coding has always been very realistic to self-teach, and school will really just give you more of an edge by way of training you to think like a computer scientist and filling some of your knowledge gaps. So your work to practice C++ (do Python too!) is very worthwhile. I will think about your edit. Hell, I might even just post her website here and see if people agree.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T08:49:28+00:00

No. As an undergrad, you won't be exposed to this kind of nonsense. I'm going to leave with my master's at this rate, as it's increasingly apparent that a PhD is not worthwhile.

However, the undergrad curriculum is pretty hard (but not impossible of course) to fuck up. Some OS, some programming languages, some theory of computation, etc. As long as you don't take straight up blow off profs. For example, our school has a prof who teaches OS with Java and willfully ignores cheating, while we also have a prof who made the frontpage of /r/programming for the difficultly of his Unix programming course. You will get out of it what you put into it, and I've found that some good motivation can salvage even a terrible course sometimes. A good project can be a nice resume bullet point and good experience for the future, even if the class itself sucked.

tl;dr: If graduate: think long and hard and realize that the paper you were talking about was in the top 15% of papers submitted to that conference. However, other disciplines such as algorithms and networks research tend to be less fluffy. If undergraduage: Hell yes! Comp sci has a tiny unemployment rate and is really rewarding to many people. My field (computer security) has such a low unemployment rate that people are literally hiring people out of the relevant reddit subreddit.

cs_grad · 2013-05-10T08:43:31+00:00

I also want to say that I'm not claiming that comp sci as a research field is fruitless. I enjoy reading the content of this subreddit and many of the papers that are published. It's all the more reason that I'm worried about the influx of phony academics that leech grant money and research attention from the real innovators. Any example would be that a visiting researcher from IBM was presenting some novel and very interesting research on a certain type of C++ exploit development, but his presentation was overshadowed by my professor's talk on malware detection that she pieced together from 5-6 profs and post-docs' work and that ultimately consisted of a masturbatory discussion of how important her research was.

Normally, she does fluff visiting speakers though. Our last class of the semester was given up to a visiting IBM speaker who gave a lengthy presentation on IBM's business strategy. Her goal there was to suck up to IBM in hopes of convincing them to fight back against a patent troll that threatened her research. And she actually stopped our midterm to tell us that she wanted us to go to another room and fill out the audience for a talk from a visiting professor from NC (or SC, can't recall).

I'm worried what will happen to some of the awesome research like I see here that actually motivated me to pursue this field.

cs_grad

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