Rajaram as "Scientist"

[Steve Farmer]

I wrote, on Rajaram:

>You will find bibliographical listings of two minor engineering notes:
>
>(1) A three-pager in SIGSAM Bulletin (an engineering bulletin) in
>May, 1980.
>
>(2) A one-page note in InTech (put out by the Instrument Society
>of America) from April, 1987.

Vidyasankar Sundaresan added:

> The ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) database gives a
> total of six references, mostly in ISA Transactions, the rest
> in InTech.

Thanks much, Vidyasankar. I actually just pulled up the ISI
database. ISI
starts too late for the 1980 three-pager but finds the 1987 note,
plus the others missed by the AI database.

And nothing changes. The six *brief* papers/notes? naming
Rajaram as sole author, apparently written while he was in a
department of industrial design, add up between 1980 and 1990 to
15 pages!! ISI records that these have been cited four times, less
than one citation per paper. Rajaram is also mentioned as second
author of a 1992 paper that no one has ever cited..

The problem isn't numbers but inflation, ending in the
absurd boast that Rajaram

 was "one America's best-known
workers in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics." No one
I know in AI has heard of him. Compare him in the ISI
database (look at the number of citations!) with Winograd,
Sejnowski, Hinton, Rumelhart, Patricia or Paul Churchland,
Feigenbaum, McCarthy, Feldman, Minsky -- or a couple
hundred other AI workers.

Decipherment, horse seals, scientific fame -- a persistent
pattern. "Sword of Truth" indeed!