Evidence Puts Doubts on the IEEE/ACM’s Investigation
After the tragedy that a Ph. D. candidate Huixiang Chen committed suicide in the University of Florida with a death note claiming that he refused to continue commit acts of academic dishonesty and accused his advisor Dr. Tao Li, IEEE TCCA and ACM SIGARCH launched an investigation into the alleged reviewing irregularities surrounding the event. We appreciate all the efforts behind this investigation but some evidence from Huixiang Chen’s personal laptop put doubts on the result of the investigation.
As the investigation result claims:
“The committee evaluated whether the paper in question was reviewed according to the established conference guidelines and the review practices of maintaining double blindness, without any contacts from the outside or discussions outside the review process. The committee has determined that there was no evidence of misconduct as part of the paper review process.”
The first evidence found in Huixiang Chen’s belongings is a documentation that potentially utilized during Huixiang Chen’s rebuttal — a standard process in the paper submission procedure that candidates defend their papers and answer reviewers’ questions in their reply. This document listed all the review details of the paper with the reviewers’ names, which apparently breaks the established conference guidelines of double blindness :
Here we urge that IEEE TCCA and ACM SIGARCH can give the public clear and responsible answers of the following questions:
- Are Yunji Chen, Lizhong Chen, Mahut and Mike O’Connor reviewers of the paper 3D-based video recognition acceleration by leveraging temporal locality?
- If yes, how did Dr.Tao Li’s team as authors of the paper know the person mentioned above are the reviewers of their paper?
The second evidence is that in Huixiang Chen’s belongings there are over hundreds of confidential draft papers which will be published at the coming ISCA-2019 and HPCA-2019 and marked as “DO NOT DISTRIBUTE”. Detailed reviews of these papers including reviewer’s name and email addresses are also found. As papers submitted to a conference are intended to be confidential to reviewers, we don’t believe it is normal that Huixiang Chen, a Ph.D student and an author of a paper that would be published in the coming ISCA-2019, should be given these confidential draft papers and reviews.
Here are some of the confidential draft papers’ details and lists of these papers and reviews. Since these review details contain the name of the reviewer and we don’t want to break the double-blindness principle, we will not post the details of reviews here.
IEEE TCCA and ACM SIGARCH should also give a transparent explanation to the public that:
- Is it an academic misconduct that Huixiang Chen as an author was given those confidential draft papers and reviews of the coming ISCA-2019 conference? How did he acquire these confidential draft papers and reviews?
- If these confidential draft papers and reviews are coming from Huixiang Chen’s advisor Dr. Tao Li, an external reviewer of the ISCA-2019 who supposed should only have review access to several papers, how could he acquire these large amount of confidential draft papers?
- During the investigation, have the committee ever got evidence mentioned above? If yes, why did the committee determine that there was no evidence of misconduct as part of the paper review process; If no, how would the committee convince the public that the investigation is a responsible and thorough one without including important evidence from the accuser (Huixiang Chen) and the related insiders ?(As far as we know, non of the insiders have been asked by the investigation committee for providing evidence for the investigation, neither did any member of the committee try to get evidence from Huixiang Chen’s lawyer and family.)
It should have been unnecessary that we expose these evidence and challenge the result of the investigation, if the committee can drive a responsible, transparent and thorough investigation. These are the “potential academic misconduct” evidence only at the paper review stage. What about the data and experiments in the paper? Where is the source code of the experiments? What does the raw data look like? Can those results be reproducible? We really don’t want to continue exposing evidence to public in this way which may keep weaken the public credibility of IEEE TCCA and ACM SIGARCH.
It has already been 7 months after the suicide of the Ph. D. candidate Huixiang Chen who wanted to stay honest and used his own life to guard the bottom line of academic ethics. We believe his death should not be perfunctory treated and it could really awaken the conscience of the entire academia.
