Robot academia

You will recall that academic spam inviting lowly researchers to robot conferences in handily pleasant locations.

Now we see the researchers fighting back, with SCIGen, a tool for creating random research papers. See examples (in PDF form) here and here.

Sadly, in the way of computer science japes, the tool currently only covers papers in the Computer Science field. I would love to see the equivalent tool let loose on critical theory. I recall one conference I attended where a paper allegedly on Pynchon and Baudrillard (yes, you can see this coming, can’t you?) consisted of a half-hour cut-up of Gravity’s Rainbow with some pop lyrics.

Anyway, the delightful thing about SCIgen (found via Kevan is that the builders have managed to get a paper accepted to WMSCI2005. After a quick fund-raising exercise, they to attend in July and deliver a completely randomly generated talk.

It is traditional to end here with a comment like “You couldn’t make it up”, a sentiment clearly inappropriate in this instance. Perhaps, instead, I’ll settle for the rather less folksy “You wouldn’t wish it to have been made up”.