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Archived updates for Friday, April 22, 2005

TGIF for Questionable Invention Disclosures

We all get them. Those purely functional invention disclosures where the client thinks that "it's the patent attorney's job" to explain how to actually make and use the invention. Well now, thanks to Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn, and Dan Aguayo, three graduate students at the PDOS research group at MIT CSAIL, clients who simply want to "get more patents" can easily use the "SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator" website.

According to an April 14, 2005 report from Reuters, their computer-generated paper entitled "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" was accepted for presentation to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

The students explain that the goal of their website is to "auto-generate submissions to fake conferences; that is, conferences with no quality standards, which exist only to make money. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (for example, check out the gibberish on the WMSCI 2005 website). Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end."

Conference organizer Nagib Callaos reportedly told Reuters that the paper was one of a small number accepted on a "non-reviewed" basis. "We thought that it might be unfair to refuse a paper that was not refused by any of its three selected reviewers. The author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility of the content of their paper."

Conference organizers had not yet formally rescinded their invitation to present the paper and the students have now raised more than enough money to make it down to Orlando in order to give "a completely randomly-generated talk."

Still need some drawings for your disclosure? Click here for Context Free Design Grammar where you can use your randomly assembled paper's as a text file input to spit out a neat graphic.
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