A paper published in this years CAADRIA Conference - CAADRIA 2019: Intelligent & Informed: 24th International Conference of Computer Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia has been discovered to have heavily plagiarized its research output from work originally created by the Wallacei team.
In this post, we highlight the extent of how much was plagiarized from Wallacei to ensure that credible authors from the architectural and wider academic community refrain from using the paper as a reference in any future work.
The evidence below has been submitted to CAADRIA; and so we would like to take this opportunity to express our thanks and gratitude to their excellent efforts in addressing our concerns. Their swift action and detailed attention was truly commendable. CAADRIA have assured us that the paper will be removed and deleted from any of CAADRIA’s online platforms, and preventative measures will be taken to stop similar cases from occurring again in the future.
Wallacei is a free tool that has been developed over the past 4 years without income or profit. We love our work and love sharing it with the architecture and design community. Despite the effect of the discovery of the plagiarizing paper on our team's morale, we will continue to ensure that our work and the content that supports it continues to be easily accessible from multiple different online platforms.
The plagiarized content is highlighted below:
Plagiarizing Paper Title:
Developing Algorithmic Methodology to Visualize & Evaluate The Dynamics Of Urban Form In The Early Design Phase
Authors:
SHAO-YU CHA and TAY-SHENG JENG
Page Number:
CAADRIA 2019 PROCEEDINGS, Volume 2, PAGES 121 – 130.
1.
The authors of the paper selected a video that is an original piece of work created and posted online by the Wallacei team (dates and platforms are listed below) and extracted from the video multiple screenshots and were presented as the plagiarizing author’s original work.
The images used in the plagiarizing paper were labelled as follows:
Figure 5 – Page 126
Figure 6 – Page 127
Figure 7 – Page 128 (Top part of the Figure, the bottom part of Figure 7 is discussed in the following sections).
The video was published by the Wallacei Team in the dates below through the following platforms:
January 23 2018: https://vimeo.com/252368844
January 25 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvply1NPw4E&feature=youtu.be
March 22 2018: https://www.wallacei.com/news/wallacei-update
2.
The content of the video above is from an experiment co-developed by one of the Wallacei Development Team, which has been previously published (more details in the following sections) from which the data used for the experiment presented in the video was also copied by the authors of the plagiarizing paper and presented as their own work. The citation of the original paper is the following, and it can be downloaded through the following link:
Navarro, D., Makki, M. and Bermejo, A. (2018) ‘Urban-Tissue Optimization through Evolutionary Computation’, Mathematics, vol. 6, no. Special Issue: Evolutionary Computation.
Original Text:
“the experiment sets out to generate an urban patch that optimizes for four primary objectives:
- CY—Larger courtyards for open public spaces (number of mesh faces exposed).
- B—High solar exposure on the building façades (number of mesh faces exposed).
- C—Greater block connectivity (numerical value based on Figure 5).
- DE—High population density (one that is close to the current state) (hab/km2).”
Plagiarised Text:
“The experiment sets out to generate an urban patch that optimizes for four primary objectives, as shown in Figure 6.
- Larger courtyards for open public spaces (number of mesh faces exposed).
- High solar exposure on the building façades (number of mesh faces exposed).
- Greater block connectivity.
- Urban Density”
3.
In Figure 7 (Page 128) of the plagiarizing paper, the lower part of the figure shows a grasshopper definition, this grasshopper definition is a section of an example file provided in the installation folder of an early release of the Wallacei Software (found under Wallacei versions 1.2. or 1.3. or 1.4.). This example file has actually nothing to do with the building of any geometry, this example file is to construct GENOMES of solutions extracted by the evolutionary simulation. As such, in this specific case, not only did the authors present the example file that was developed by Wallacei as their own, but they also incorrectly presented it as something that has nothing to do with what is being discussed in the paper.
4.
The figures presented in the plagiarizing paper are also used extensively in the poster presentation of this paper by the same authors. In the poster presentation, approximately 80% of the poster is presenting content from the video published by the Wallacei Team.
5.
In section 4.2. (page 125) of the plagiarizing paper, the following text is copied verbatim from the Wallacei website. Although the authors start the sentence by referencing Wallacei and its authors (which they do incorrectly as they forgot to mention the third author in the Wallacei Team, Yutao Song), the copied text is not in quotation marks, and so is presented as the authors’ original work, which it is not.
“It makes more informed decisions at all stages of their evolutionary simulations; including setting up the design problem, analysing the outputted results and selecting the desired solution or solutions for the final output. The plugin is streamlined to give all of the user efficient access to the data outputted by their evolutionary simulations, and enable clear and efficient methods for analysis and selection - The aim is for users (of all degrees of expertise) to better understand their evolutionary simulations in Figure 5, gain a thorough understanding of the outputted numeric values, and seamlessly extract the optimised data; all within one user interface.”
The original text can be found through the following link:
6.
In the same section (Section 4.2.) on page 127 of the paper in question, the following text is also copied verbatim from the OLD Wallacei website. This is the text presented in the paper:
“The aim of the add-on is to assist users to more comprehensively understand how their implemented evolutionary algorithm performs by comparatively evaluating empirical data outputted by the algorithm. Thus possible strategies are presented towards modifying the algorithmic approach in order to gain more efficiency in evolving solutions that generate variation yet simultaneously increase in fitness. It seeks to address this problem through utilizing an analytic approach that aims to untangle and dissect the plethora of empirical data outputted by an evolutionary simulation. The evolutionary algorithm is developed by means of a detailed analysis of each solution and its parameters. Thus it assists the user in making a highly informed decision for the solutions to be selected at the end of the simulation. The computational setup for the design experiments have been developed according to the complexity of the problem being investigated.”
7.
In the same page as point 6 above, parts of the following sentence were copied verbatim from a paper published in CAADRIA 2018 by Wallacei Co-Authors Mohammed Makki and Milad Showkatbakhsh (the original text can be found through the following citation (http://papers.cumincad.org/data/works/att/caadria2018_065.pdf) on page 157, in the second paragraph of section 4.1.).
Makki, M. and Showkatbakhsh, M. (2018) ‘Control of Morphological Variation Through Population Based Fitness Criteria’, Learning, Adapting and Prototyping, Proceedings of the 23rd CAADRIA Conference, Beijing, China, The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong, vol. 1, pp. 153–162.
The Original Text:
“in response to the complexity of the problem, the second experiment utilised a highly simplified phenotype as the base primitive”
The Plagiarized Text:
“In response to the complexity of the urban problems, the experiment utilized a highly simplified phenotype as the base primitive”
8.
Finally, it has also come to our attention that the presentation of the plagiarizing paper used images from the Wallacei Website. None of the slides reference the original source of those images.
The original source is from the Showcase page on the wallacei website, which can be accessed through the following link: https://www.wallacei.com/showcase
The content in the showcase section of the Wallacei website, (from which the authors took content from for their presentation) is work conducted by students and offices that took part in different Wallacei workshops that we provide.
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