Re: Conferences in computer science

At 11:20 +0200 16.4.05, [email protected] wrote:
>The general idea is actually not quite new. When I attended a 
>lecture in social psychology (many years ago), the teacher told us 
>about a field test which consisted of a eloquently written paper 
>without content, which the conductors of the field test managed to 
>get published in a quite prominent journal ...

You're probably referring to the Sokal affair, where a physicist 
managed to have a bogus paper accepted by a journal called Social 
Text.

You can find some material on this on Groucho, at 
<http://iccl.tu-dresden.de/~guglielm/Groucho/> (use groucho/marx), 
and then go under ` Affairs'. Have fun!

>... withouth any doubts, the situation became worse in the meantime ...

I don't think the situation became any worse in mathematics or 
physics, for example. Why computer `scientists' then? Do they want to 
become like sociologists, regarding rigour and authoritativeness?

To be clear: conferences like, say, Tableaux or LPAR, not to mention 
CSL and LICS (speaking of conferences that intersect with our work) 
surely don't incur in the risk of accepting any bogus paper. HOWEVER, 
it is precisely the relative importance of conferences for curricula 
that generates monsters like the Orlando conference that accepts 
random papers.

By the way, I guess it's a common observation to see people in 
academia, in positions of relative power, who built their careers on 
conferences, and who are COMPLETELY INCOMPETENT. In many places, 
they're the majority!

-Alessio Guevara