Academic organization exists only to put on conferences

A few years ago I started getting these invitations to speak at a conference in Italy. The invitation seemed a little suspicious and the event was a little too out in space academically, so I ignored it. My buddy Chuck forwards a debunking of the conference by a professor in Australia. The prof submitted three papers to the "review committee" each of which had a front page of authentic looking stuff, with the remainder academic nonsense. For instance:

The growth of information retrieval corresponded with the popularity of Sartre and existentialism, so that answers simply were; their meaning and content was not relevant. Later, the influence of popular mysticism and Zen philosophies led to a reverse approach, in which answers were not. Anarchists insisted that answers be statements that undermine the question. Another approach has been to attack the implicit dominance of the query and ask whether the query is relevant to the answers, thus seeking equality in the query-answer relationship.

The papers were all accepted!

The professor, Joel Stubinz, concludes that no one reviewed this paper, as any reviewer would flag this as gibberish. He notes that there is a fee for presenting your paper, and the rules state you don't even have to present the paper so long as you pay the fee.

Prof. Stubinz observes:

This highly-successful event -- a remarkable 1,859 papers were accepted for the 2001 event -- is run by the International Institute of Informatics and Systemics (or IIIS). This is "a non-profitable international Organization which takes into consideration the globalization process". It appears to have no officers or location, and is not associated with any academic institution. Its only public role appears to be to host the SCI conference.

See:

http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~jz/sci/

How many people pay money to present at this event and think they are advancing science?

They're still at it: