[pbzcnepu]

some of us made a big effort to get anyone at the IEEE or ACM to care about this ISCA'19 incident. The initial investigation by Torrellas was run mostly by ISCA insiders with conflicts of interest, and mostly seemed to be a stall tactic. They did eventually open a new investigation.

ISCA'20 should really have been cancelled until this was resolved.

See a timeline of our attempts to get anyone at ACM/IEEE to care: http://pbzcnepu.net/isca/timeline.html

[throwawayiionqz]

I am wondering if the NSF program officers responsible for overseeing the grants should be contacted as they would be in power to make the University and the PIs accountable and/or start their own investigations.

They can be easily found in grant webpages, eg https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1900713

[pbzcnepu]

The program officers were contacted, leading to the OIG being notified on 6 December 2019 and supposedly an investigation was openened, but we have not heard anything back since then.

[obmelvin]

I just want to thank you for your actions and ask if you have any advice for career paths to do something about this type of academic bullshit. My GF is currently pursuing a PhD in biochem but very interested in pursuing science policy so that she can do something about all the injustice one witnesses as a graduate student.

As someone who received both their B.S. and M.S. at UIUC, I'm honestly disgusted at how various professors and administration have handled certain incidents that my friends have been part of

[pbzcnepu]

there's really not much one can do. In Comp Arch, most of the honest people left the field years ago because they got sick of all this nonsense. Most were happy to let those left behind play their silly peer-review games, but when the student suicide happened it was like a call to action.

It is easier to fight things from the outside, as the internal higher-ups have less power to mess up your life.

It's interesting you mention UIUC, as traditionally that was the source of a lot of suspect papers. It was a running joke about the "coincidence" of how many people with UIUC connections managed to get papers into ISCA each year.

[dbancajas]

is this true? Can you expound on this? which suspect papers are there?

I know there are a lot of solid professors in UIUC like Joseph Torellas, Sarita Adve (C++ consistency models), Vikram Adve (who is the adviser of Chris Lattner - creator of LLVM). This is really bothersome and I hope it's not from one of those professors.

[pbzcnepu]

well let's take Torrellas. Check out the two papers at ISCA'20 with him as an author.

Both use modified "cycle-accurate" simulators for the results. For now let's ignore all the issues with the accuracy of these simulators.

Let's validate how "solid" the work is. Drop an e-mail to Torrellas and ask for the code they used so you can see if you can reproduce their work. Hopefully things have changed and they'll send you the code but in my experience they'll just say no.

So they got two papers in which are unverifiable, and none of the reviewers ever saw the code involved. This bothers some people, but it's not unusual at ISCA.

[idoeestuff]

can you expand? i know the clique, but at least for the specific work i follow, the work isn't bad recently.

of course, nothing surprises me.

[pbzcnepu]

it isn't always that the work is bad, it's just the review process for getting in has always seemed to be easier for people with the right connections. Not necessarily in an overt conspiratorial way like the recent allegations either.

The reason people have latched on to the current set of allegations is there seems to be actual concrete proof of misconduct that can be acted on.