[tytso]

Well, it got the heads of the CS department to finally notice. The preprint of the "hypocrite commit" paper was sent out late last year, and while there was contrversy about that back then, with Prof. Lu admitting that he didn't think it was Human Studies Research (HSR) and so he didn't bother to get IRB approval, the CS department heads didn't do squat. And the UMN IRB said, "Okey-dokey!" after being asked to do post hoc review (which as others have said, a post hoc review should have raised red flags with the IRB right there). It's the lack of institutional response and lack of any kind of instiutional controls which is the most concerning.

And we didn't take any action until another series of suspicious patches started getting sent for review from a graduate student from the same group. At which point, we have a unrepentant professor who has gotten rewarded by a paper at IEEE S&P, and being invited to serve on the PC of the IEEE S&P next year, and an apparently apathetic, toothless IRB at UMN. I can see people criticizing us if we hadn't taken action.