No Time to Write a Paper? No Problem. Let SCIgen Write One for You

Some enterprising graduate students at MIT with too much time on their hands have created SCIgen, an automatic computer science paper generator. Motivated by frequent e-mail requests (i.e., spam) for papers to dubious international science conferences with no real scientific affiliation, mission, or - it appears - standards, the students created SCIgen to produce equally dubious conference papers. The randomly generated papers include all of the essential elements of an academic research paper including graphs, figures, and citations. In fact, a SCIgen paper was recently accepted to the WMSCI 2005 conference, which "is a forum for focusing into specific disciplinary research, as well as for multi, inter and trans-disciplinary studies and projects. One of its aims is to relate disciplines fostering analogical thinking and, hence, producing input to the logical thinking," which is another way of saying that the conference isn't about anything in particular. Lacking travel funds to attend the conference, the students raised a little over $2000 in donations in 72 hours over the internet.