The Counter-deception Blog

SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator

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.

New: 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".

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

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!

o Acceptance e-mail

o A strange follow-up email, along with our response

o 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.)

o With the many generous donations we received, we paid one conference registration fee of $390.

o 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) Berkeley (CA) CMU (PA) Brown (RI)
RM Mirrors: MIT (MA) Berkeley (CA) 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) Berkeley (CA) CMU (PA) Brown (RI)
RM Mirrors: MIT (MA) Berkeley (CA) 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) Berkeley (CA) CMU (PA) Brown (RI)
RM Mirrors: MIT (MA) Berkeley (CA) 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.

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:

· uzful.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.

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