Part 2: the story continues...

Not acceptable at all! Yes... I am good natured, nice to everyone, very forgiving, etc. But I do have a right to get frustrated at times. I mailed my project guide saying that what he had done was not acceptable and that we were irritated and angry. I also said that what he did was plain plagiarism and that in any other institute the person would have been asked to resign. I demanded and explanation from him for what he did and said that if the explanation was good enough then we will take back the request we sent to the conference authorities.

I got no reply from him. But got enough replies from close friends with whom I shared the mail. I am not someone who gets angry easily. But the way the prof operates has always been troubling to me and most of my batchmates. And I also have an issue with the quality of papers. In fact, my last paragraph in my mail to him appeciated him for generating interest in research in the department but also said that the way it was done was wrong. He cared nothing about the quality of "research"(if you can call it that) and bothered only about whether it got published somewhere - which is a shady way to operate. There are enough people in my batch who would agree that he adds no value to the papers and projects he guides (except for fancy names and adding his name to the paper or suggesting topics for some - ususally based on previous papers done by others with him). In fact, it was a concious decision by our group not to publish the work as a paper as we did not want him to get one more paper under his name without any contribution... and of course we weren't desperate for papers as some of our batchmates and juniors have turned out to be!(dont take it personally guys...its just my opinion)


I forwarded the mail to the HOD and Principal at college and CCed the prof again. This time I did get a reply. But from the HOD!
Content:
" I can very well say that the Supervisor who is guiding the project is the sole owner of the work. If you want you can very well enquire in your University and in IIT where you are studying."

Wonder which other college would encourage plagiarism by professors. It not as though he borrowed the idea and did some work on it. His only value add to my project had been converting the report into the "two-column" format!!!

Wait...there is more from the HOD:
He is supposedly disappointed that we guys are being hostile towards our college after leaving the institute(hostile?! we are pointing out that someone is unethical there and trying to correct the situation!). And adds that he will send a note to our institutes regarding this(saying that we reported plagiarism and hence we are wrong-doers?). Well...looked like an empty threat...so I didnt bother responding. Sudharsan did respond. He said that we expected support from college and since we did not get it, the conference authorities will take whatever action.

And today, I get to know (one of the juniors i mentioned before at least felt guilty of what he did and was apolegitic. he was also good enough to pass on this information to us) that the project guide told them that the HOD and Prinicpal plan to take "severe action" against us by writing to our institutes(where we currently study) that we had made fake recommendation letter when we applied for our PG. WOW! Look at the levels to which these guys can stoop down! Amazing. I of course have faith that IIMB is strongly against plagiarism and will not agree with any explanation given these people. But its a totally different angle that these guys are bringing in by saying that we made fake reco letters. Well... I haven't done that. So I'm not bothered. I did take a reco from my project guide... lets see what he mails IIMB!


Forgot to mention..just adding this bit now. I did keep one the profs I trust in SVCE in the loop when all this happened and he/she said he/she was aware of the "quality of research" that was going on under this guide and that he/she will talk to the HOD about this. But on seeing the response from the HOD, he/she decided against it. I dont blame him/her for that. No point arguing with people who have no clue on whats right and whats wrong!

Ah... At last! A real post!

Yup. You wouldn't have imagined me (a guy with a perennial writer's block) to actually sit and type this blog. And yes... its extreme frustration that has driven me to blog!

The purpose of this blog: No particular purpose... its more like "just to keep a record of this incident"

So... here is the incident:

Sept 19th, 10 AM
I open my mailbox to find a mail from my close friend from my engineering college and my final year project partner there. The subject reads:
"Look at this..the cheap fello took our ug thesis and published a paper without crediting us"

"Uhh! Who? What? Where?" was my initial reaction. I visited the link that he had sent in the body of the mail to find the abstract of a paper published in an IEEE conference. (I had published the link here but removed it in 5 mins thinking of the implications it might have on the students whose names are up on the page)

I visted the link and found the title to be referring to our work in our final year project. The paper had been published by my project guide(that we did not seek or receive any guidance is a different issue) and lots of other names from my college, which I figured out were names of my juniors in college.

I read the abstract of the paper. A quick check on my project abstract(of which I have a copy in my mailbox) revealed that the abstract had been copied from my project abstract "verbatim" except for adding a few lines/ words.

The next obvious step was to check the content of the paper itself. The paper wasnt accessible free to me or to my project mates (Sudharsan(who brought it to our notice) and Vijay) and Vijay had to finally buy it to see what the contents were. Well... I wouldn't have even guessed this - it was ripped off our project report verbatim. Sentence for sentence, graphs, all copied right out of our report. Needless to say, we were furious. Sudharsan reported to the conference authorities that this was our work and that we hadn't been acknowledged for it.

We actually found that our names had been part of the paper (without us knowing it was being published!) initially when the paper was sent for approval. After approval our names were promptly removed and our juniors' names were added(apparently for a "price"! Talk about ethics!!). So there was this pdf giving details on the presentations to happen in the conference which had our names on the same site. We later found that fake email ids had been created for us in order to make the initial submission at the conference. Hey! Isn't that a criminal offence?!!

So we get in touch with a couple of our juniors who were part of this. They were pretty scared about the consequences as they had no clue that this was our work. They had been told that it was the work of 2 of their juniors, whose names were also obviously included in the paper. Our beloved project guide had said that he was in need of money to publish the paper in the conference and that he would include their names in the paper if they contributed towards the publication (this is getting better isn't it?).

One of the juniors we contacted quickly told the Prof(ok..assistant prof..whatever) that we had come to know of this (duh! obviously we would have found it someday. he keeps updating his page on the college site with his "published paper" list...and its fascinating for us to see him publish a new paper every week... like a factory producing papers. 30 papers a year in all unrelated fields! Now go to svce.ac.in and check the faculty pages in CSE department to find out who :) ). The prof calls up a friend of ours(Sai) whose number he knew to ask for Sudharsan's number. He tells Sai that this work was an improvement on our project. Sai tells him that we have purchased the paper and had a look at it and could not find any such improvements. Prof:"no pa.. we are working on improvements now". Ya rite!

Next he calls Sudharsan. He tries to convince Sudharsan that he had tried to contact us before publishing it and had in fact included our names in it before it got approved (which is true). He says that he could not contact us and hence removed our names from the paper. Now, this is certainly not a reasonable excuse. When he got into trouble it took him 20 mins to contact us. But before that he wasn't able to contact us and had create fake ids initially and then taken our names off. Not acceptable.

First Blog

First let me make this clear.. the reason i created this blog id was so that i can post comments on other blogs!
I have no inclination to writing stuff but i cant resist posting comments on blogs..so here goes..