Reuters: “‘Rooter’ features such mind-bending gems as: ‘the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning’ and ‘We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions.'”
Via Doc Searls. Pretty much sums up the sorry state of computer science research these days, if you ask me.
I’m not worried. The conference in question was one of those conferences pulled together by the IT conferencing industry, and not an honest-to-goodness academic conference. It’s been widely known that that conference in particular will accept just about anything as an unreviewed paper in an effort to try to up their credibility by someday having something significant presented there.
Real research still happens, and is in fact still the norm.
I have to agree with Daniel here. The point of the paper getting into the conference was to show that there are some really crappy (read: money-grubbing) conferences out there.
A lot of the computer science research is still on the right track. While I can’t say much for the advancement of algorithms or architecture, I know my field has been making steady progress for a while.