COMPUTER scientists are not the only researchers whose inboxes fill up with invitations to submit papers to previously unheard-of conferences, but they probably get more than most. Researchers Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were so annoyed at what they dubbed “spamferences” that they did what computer scientists might have been expected to do: they wrote a program called SCIgen that generates random papers and submitted the papers to random conferences.
Some might say that the computer field is particularly susceptible to this prank. The first paragraph of one of the machine-written papers…
