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Tuesday, February 05, 2008
WSEAS: A Greek Tragedy
Posted by Lance
This is a joint post by Lance AND Bill in response to this post on the Sfaka blog claiming "false and misleading information" on our blog (scroll down). We would like to set the record straight.
Draw your own conclusions.
- On November 27 GASARCH made two posts about bogus conferences. In the post Bogus or Not–You Decide, an anonymous commentor asked about whether it would be a turn-off if a WSEAS paper was on the resume.
Some folks I worked with in the past published some of our work as a conference paper in WSEAS proceedings with my name on it. (I think they might not have known about junk conferences.)In the post Theoretical and Mathematical Foundations of Bogosity, Bill saidI looked on the web for more info on [TMFCS08] and could not find anything saying it was bogus (By contrast you can find stuff about WSEAS being bogus). Anyone have any more information?- On Tuesday, January 15, Nikos Mastorakis, executive director of WSEAS, called Lance very angry about the November posts and comments. Mastorakis wanted us to remove the offending statements about WSEAS. We decided against this and sent him email offering him to do a Guest Post defending the conference. GASARCH and Lance also agreed that they would not make comments on his post, and would post it unedited. Mastorakis called Lance back the next day, still very angry and unhappy with our decision and threatened to complain to the "president of the United States". At which point Lance hung up on him.
- Mastorakis tried to call Lance many times over the next couple of days but Lance refused to answer. He also called GASARCH at home, but having heard about this from Lance, GASARCH hung up immediately. GASARCH emailed him that calling at home is unacceptable, but calling at the office is fine, and also gave his office phone number. He never called at the office.
- On Friday, Lance decided to answer the phone from Mastorakis. Mastorakis apologized, but still angry about the comments. He wanted to write the guest post but with the comments turned off. (That is, he could post defending the conference, but nobody could comment on it.) We refused and he said he would still send us a post. We haven't heard back from him since.
- On January 29, a comment appeared on the first post defending WSEAS from someone claiming to be Shuchen Li, though his web page looks Greek to us.
- Also on January 29, the SFAKA post appeared (without our knowledge) warning about false and misleading information and quoting the Bogus or Not post but with the following change: wherever the phrase `WSEAS' appeared it now says `GASARCH'. For example (compare with above)
Some folks I worked with in the past published some of our work as a conference paper in GASARCH proceedings with my name on it. (I think they might not have known about junk conferences.)1:16 PM #
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I look forward to submitting my papers to GASARCH'08. Where is the Call for Papers?
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What about a post on the latest Turing award ?
It's at least as related to complexity theory as WSEAS, and one of the recipients has a greek-looking name.
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It's coming, we just want to do it right.
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If you click on the link to Prof. Mastorakis homepage, you can easily check that he is a very productive researcher:
He has published "over 350 papers in international books, journals and conferences".
I counted 21 WSEAS papers among the 24 "publications in international journals and books from 2002 up to now".
...and DBLP shows a total of 2 entries.
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In the end, the person who really loses out is the tax-payer whose money is being spent to "work on" these papers, write them, pay conference fees, fly to these conferences and have conference lunches.
It is tragic that people who really have the power to spend tax-payer's money, are unable to tell what is good research and what is not.
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Are you sure any human is actually behind the blog post you link to? It seems like a bot randomly generated it. It makes no sense to me at all.
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DEEP and SINCERE APOLOGIES for the MISTAKE
FROM THE OWNERS OF THE BLOG:
The Blog Sfaka was for communication of some students that participate not only in the Society that you reported, but also in several other scientific societies.
We used to update the Blog by a computer program (not manually).
We had to remove the name of the society replacing it with something else, and, the Daemon of electronic typography replaced him by the
first word of the message.
We did not have any INTENTION to offend you.
We respect and honor Professor Gasarch and Professor Fortnow.
Simply the replacement of the names
was by accident (Cntrl + H).
Now, the BLOG is Absolutely Closed and we ask sincere apologies from Professor Gasarch for this computer mistake.
We did not have any reason to offend Professor Gasarch.
On the other hand, we would like to emphasize that we know how difficult is to publish in the conferences of aforementioned society and what is the reviewer role and we fill a great ofence
and indignation.
We do not have to add anything else. We are proud and we will continue supporting the organization of the WSEA
and sincere apologies for this,
WE REPEAT, it was a computer mistake for which we ask you the sincere misunderstanding.
About the comments of S.Li:
We have worked several times in the secretariat of some conferences of the association and this statistics is real. You can also ask the Reviewers:
http://www.worldses.org/review/june-july-august-2007.htm
what is the rejection/acceptance rate.
You can choose any random person of that list and you can ask him by email.
It is so simple.
From us, we are sending you our love and appreciation. The conferences are here: COME and SEE
Happy new Year 2008
Once more: We respect and honor Professor Gasarch and Professor Fortnow and sincere apologies for the mistake
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DEEP and SINCERE APOLOGIES for the MISTAKE (correcting some grammatical errors)
FROM THE OWNERS OF THE BLOG:
The Blog Sfaka was for communication of some students that participate not only in the Society that you reported, but also in several other scientific societies.
We used to update the Blog by a computer program (not manually).
We had to remove the name of the society replacing it with something else, and, the Daemon of electronic typography replaced him by the
first word of the message.
We did not have any INTENTION to offend you.
We respect and honor Professor Gasarch and Professor Fortnow.
Simply the replacement of the names
was by accident (Cntrl + H).
Now, the BLOG is Absolutely Closed and we ask sincere apologies from Professor Gasarch for this computer mistake.
We did not have any reason to offend Professor Gasarch.
On the other hand, we would like to emphasize that we know how difficult is to publish in the conferences of aforementioned society and what is the reviewer role and we feel a great ofence
and indignation.
We do not have to add anything else. We are proud and we will continue supporting the organization of the WSEA
and sincere apologies for this,
WE REPEAT, it was a computer mistake for which we ask you the sincere UNDERTSANDING!
About the comments of Shuchen Li:
He is absolutely right:
We have worked several times in the secretariat of some conferences of the association and this statistics is real. You can also ask the Reviewers:
http://www.worldses.org/review/june-july-august-2007.htm
what is the rejection/acceptance rate.
You can choose any random person of that list and you can ask him by email.
It is so simple.
From us, we are sending you our love and appreciation. The conferences are here: COME and SEE
With warm greetings
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for the anonymous colleague:
Prof.Matsorakis is well known researcher in Multidinensiona;l Systems (one of the most important in this field and he is still active)
Simply, the DLBP does not index the I΅EEE Trans. on Circuits & Systms, the I΅EEE Trans.on Signal Processing, the
I΅EEE Trans.on Electromagnetic Combatibility, the I΅EEE on Automatic΅ςControl, I΅EEE Trans on microwaves where he has published his important papers. I found that he has over than 25 papers in I΅EEE
which is a really impressive record.
Of course, now as direktor of the WSE΅AS he promotes the WSE΅AS journals and conferences and he is
doing the real thing.
He has also solved the problem of Multidinensiona;l factirization anmd recently he has published an impressive number of high quality papers in applied mathematics and mechanics comparing finite elements and CI. It is better to ask him
Except his university which is military and for thsi reason very strict with the faculty staff, he was 3 times Visiting Professor in
the University of UK and Bulgaria.
As Editor in Journals and conferences , he is great, he works very hard, coordinates many scientific teams and nobody reported something bad or illegal regarding his conferences and journals.
About his society, I found it excellent and if you see their site you can see several lists of reviewers. You can ask them as the students hint in their previous post.
I think that I helped you.
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nobody reported something bad or illegal regarding his conferences and journals
Of course nobody has ever reported anything illegal, but the consensus among serious researchers seems to be that his conferences (if by that you mean WSEAS conferences) are total garbage. It's certainly not bad in the sense of illegal or immoral, but it's bad in the sense of worthless and disreputable.
Regarding Matsorakis himself, I know nothing about his character or background, and the only thing I know about his reputation is that, as far as I know, nobody I've heard of has ever heard of him outside of the context of the bogosity of WSEAS. I'd be interested if I were proved wrong, but I suspect I'm right.
As of 2003 (when his publication list was last updated), he seemed to be publishing primarily in WSEAS conferences and journals. That doesn't look good to me.
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as far as I know, nobody I've heard of has ever heard of him outside of the context of the bogosity of WSEAS
P.S. I found a technical counterexample: there's a letter from Lotfi Zadeh here. However, it is still in a WSEAS context; Zadeh just doesn't think one of their journals is bogus. Needless to say, I disagree.
And, just to throw the fuzzy logic partisans into a tizzy, I maintain that in a ideal world, I wouldn't have heard of Lotfi Zadeh either. ;-P
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Anonymous,
Why wouldn't you have heard of Zadeh in an ideal world?
These people seem to be pro-scam artists.. The wseas site is blocked from wayback machine (hmm i wonder why?), also check out the "poll" on the journals page http://www.worldses.org/journals/index.html
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Why wouldn't you have heard of Zadeh in an ideal world?
OK, that was a little unfair. I might have heard of him anyway, just not for fuzzy logic. It's a pretty obvious idea popularized through straw man arguments. For example, the claim that lots of seemingly binary distinctions, such as tall vs. not tall, are misleading and should be fuzzified. Of course, this is true, but everybody already knew it before Zadeh. That's why your doctor records your height rather than simply checking a box next to "tall". We didn't need Zadeh to introduce the profound idea of measuring "how tall" someone is. (The "tall" example actually occurs in the introduction to Zadeh's original fuzzy sets paper, although he never mentions "height".)
So my belief is that if fuzzy logic had never been announced to the world, we'd still solve problems the same way and just not have a special name for it. On the other hand, my Zojirushi rice maker wouldn't say "Neuro Fuzzy" on it. I actually bought it partly because I found the label entertaining, so I can confirm that Japanese companies have indeed derived some benefit from fuzzy logic.
Zadeh is also a contender for the world championship in e-mail signature length in the tenured professor category (23 lines and counting), which is a pet peeve of mine, but I admit it's of no real importance.
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Another toxic WSEAS blog post:
http://e-wseas.livejournal.com/4819.html
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