I probably receive an average amount of spam in my email inbox but also through my regular mail. This week I received a peculiar brochure in my post box advertising health products from a company called “Velvet Pure“:
I gave an invited talk at the 2nd Joint UAE Symposium on Social Robotics on November 21st 2016. It was a great event and I was honored to have the opportunity to address the esteemed audience.
Automatically generating scientific articles has become easy with dedicated software such as SCIgen. Even a paper that only repeated the sentence “Get me of your fucking mailing list” was recently accepted for publication. Today I received an invitation from the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics to submit a paper. Since I have practically no knowledge of Nuclear Physics I resorted to iOS auto-complete function to help me writing the paper. I started a sentence with “Atomic” or “Nuclear” and then randomly hit the auto-complete suggestions. The text really does not make any sense. After adding the first illustration on nuclear physics from Wikipedia, some references and creating a fake identity (Iris Pear, aka Siri Apple) I submitted the paper which was accepted only three hours later! I know that iOS is a pretty good software, but reaching tenure has never been this close.
UPDATE (27/10/2016): Turns out that conference organizer, OMICS Group, is currently under federal investigation.
Here is a short demonstration on how I wrote the paper:
I had the pleasure of giving a keynote at the Robot Philosophy Conference 2016. The people in Denmark have been very friendly and our hotel is great. It is very interesting to see Human-Robot Interaction being discussed from the perspective of philosophy. Below is the recording of my keynote: