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.
We went to WMSCI 2005. Check out the talks and video. You can find more details in our blog.
Also, check out our 10th anniversary celebration project: SCIpher!
Generate a Random Paper
Want to generate a random CS paper of your own? Type in some optional author names below, and click "Generate".
Author 1:
Author 2:
Author 3:
Author 4:
Author 5:
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!
Acceptance e-mail
A strange follow-up email, along with our response
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.)
With the many generous donations we received, we paid one conference registration fee of $390.
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, Instit...
