[daveFNbuck]

Their guidelines [1] state that they need your e-mail because "an algorithm uses it to determine if you are a genuine PhD candidate in math/stat." It seems that the site is meant for PhD students rather than PhD recipients.

[1] https://www.hessix.com/guide

[omaranto]

If the algorithm figured out from my email address alone that I'm not a student anymore, I'm pretty impressed. But I doubt that's what happened. :)

[daveFNbuck]

I was responding more to the idea that they're discriminating against PhDs who've left academia. If it's not meant for anyone who's graduated, then it's discriminating equally against those who've stayed.

[omaranto]

I was sort of kidding earlier. I tried registering with my current, academic, address and was rejected. I'm not surprised because it ends in "mx". The "joke" was that a PhD student at my university would have a similar looking email and I don't think they would have been accepted either. (I did have an "edu" when I was a student in the US and that address would probably have been accepted.)

[daveFNbuck]

You should ask a PhD student at your university to try. It'll be interesting if they get accepted.

[daveFNbuck]

It might not be too hard to cross-reference that email address against published papers to get an estimate of how long since you started the program, or even potentially find online records of your degree and/or thesis.

[whunting]

PhD recipients are very welcome too. The registration is put on hold for me to check manually. The algo to auto verify works for PhD candidates in several universities (US and abroad, not only .edu)

[graycat]

The application and approval process, filtering, certification, authentication, etc. sounds like a separation problem. Since the site is about math, IIRC there's some math for separation problems??

Uh, since the site is for "math/stat" and there have to be rates of false positives, that people are already complaining about, and false negatives, I don't see people complaining about spam, then we're into statistical hypothesis testing, right? Sooo, to do better on the rates of false negatives, we want more data for a more powerful test. Sooo, we need a multi-variate test. Since no way can we justify assuming probability distributions for all the relevant data, we need a distribution-free test. So, where can we find one of those???

Disclosure: This question is just an exercise. For an answer, I published one of those. So, it's an applied probability calculation based on an algebraic group of measure preserving transformations! It may be a rationalization of resampling theory. Crudely the result is obvious, but a proof is tricky. It may be that the work is a stimulation for and or connection with approximate independence, e.g., maybe as in some work of Choquet student M. Talagrand.

[ssivark]

Could you elaborate on the vision behind the "selection" criteria? Also, it would be best to clearly explain that in the Hessix user guide, in the spirit of communicating clearly with your audience :-)

[daveFNbuck]

You should probably make it more clear on that page. If the email address is only required to verify current candidates, why is it required for all registrants?

[whunting]

This is now clarified in the user guide