ED Stamp out plagiarism

It's imperative to revamp lax verification system

An artificial intelligence (AI) research team at Seoul National University is facing allegations of plagiarism involving a thesis it presented to an international conference. Professor Yoon Sung-roh of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at SNU, the correspondent author, admitted to submitting a plagiarized paper and apologized. The nation's top university began looking into the case by holding its first Research Integrity Committee meeting Monday.

The paper, which studied how artificial intelligence can be used for information data analysis, was selected as an outstanding paper at the 2022 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition that ended in New Orleans last week. A Ph.D. student at Yoon's lab, the first author, even gave an oral presentation there last Thursday.

But the next day, a video was uploaded on YouTube, claiming that the paper contained sentences copied from more than 10 other papers without proper credit. In an interview, Yoon said he was unaware of the plagiarism, adding that it was an “individual act perpetrated under pressure to achieve results” by the first author. Later someone claiming to be the first author admitted to plagiarism, saying, “I am entirely to blame for all the suspicions raised against the paper and will accept any disciplinary action without any excuse.”

Nonetheless, Yoon cannot avoid criticism as the corresponding author, given that his role is to take the lead in submitting papers for publication. He failed to spot plagiarism in the whole process ― from paper creation to submission and printing. It's all the more disappointing to know that he is a prominent AI expert who headed the Presidential Committee on the Fourth Industrial Revolution during the Moon Jae-in administration.

The deep-seated problem of plagiarism is not confined to universities. Rather, plagiarism is everywhere here because copying a few sentences is often simply overlooked. It's imperative to revamp the nation's lax verification system and hold those breaching research ethics strictly accountable so that our scholars' research achievements may not be undervalued as a whole.