Suspicious Chinese ICT Conferences

A colleague was bragging that he had a paper accepted at an international IEEE conference in China. Since IEEE has often been found to support so-called bogus or fake conferences (ones that accept any paper, even those generated by SciGen) and since I was on vacation with internet access and time on my hands, I decided to have a look.

IEEE has a site that can be used to search for conferences, so I looked for conferences in Beijing in 2009. Amazing, there are 23 IEEE conferences this year in Beijing! Okay, China is a large country. I idly flicked through a few of them, when I realized that the contact person for an number of them was given as Prof. Mengqi Zhou.

More research turned him up as Chairman of the IEEE Beijing Section, and 10 of the 23 conferences listed him as the contact. Now I was really curious, so I spent a good bit of time researching the conferences. Some appear to be legitimate - they have a venue listed on their web page, they have a small range of topics listed, there is someone more or less serious-sounding as the contact.

But others are mighty strange indeed. There are dysfunctional web sites, no venues listed. And from October 16-18, 18-20, 21-23 there are three large conferences listed at the Beijing University of Posts and Telekommunications, with a fourth from 6-8 Nov. The contact for all four conferences is the same person, Weining Wang. Three of the four have identical registration prices and registration forms - only the dates and names of the conferences have been changed and are in a different font. The fourth one has a dysfunctional web page. Here is the data that I collected during my research:

Conference, Venue according to IEEE	Dates	URL	Partici- pants	Review time	Reg. Deadline	Price Reg/Page	Comment
2009 IEEE International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications (SMI), Convention Center, Tsinghua University	26-28 Jun 2009	[1]	150	8 weeks	?	$400	Seems okay, smallish topics, PC online. Program online, Directions to university online
2009 2nd IEEE International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology (ICCSIT 2009), Beijing Convention Center	8-11 Aug 2009	[2]	350	?	?	?	No web site any more, just notice that proceedings have been sent to authors already. Contact address is given at a Chinese news/freemail account.
2009 9th International Conference on Electronic Measurement & Instruments (ICEMI 2009), Beihang University	16 Aug - 19 Aug 2009	[3]	270	2 weeks	June 30, 2009		Chinese news/freemail account. No information on venue on web site except for advertising for "Hot Spring Liesure [sic] City"
2009 IEEE Youth Conference on Information, Computing and Telecommunication (YC-ICT 2009), Gradute University of Chinese	20-21 Sep 2009	[4]	200	4 weeks	Aug 30, 2009	$300	IEEE e-mail contact, Hotels listed on web site, Google map to hotel
2009 Fourth International Conference on Bio-Inspired Computing: Theories and Applications (BIC-TA 2009), Shaoyuan Guest House Peking University	16-19 Oct 2009	[5]	120	5 weeks	June 30	$430	Venue given, functional web site, gmail contact
2009 IEEE International Conference on Communication Technology and Applications (ICCTA), Hotelecom Hotel	16-18 Oct 2009	[6]	150	3 1/2 weeks	July 20	$400 / $50	Only one page functions on home page. E-Mail Beijing University of Posts and Telekommunications, wnwang@bupt.edu.cn (Weining Wang). Registration form identical to [7] and [10]
2009 2nd IEEE International Conference on Broadband Network & Multimedia Technology (IC-BNMT 2009), High-Tech Mansion BUPT	18-20 Oct 2009	[7]	200	3 1/2 weeks	July 20	$400 / $50	E-Mail contact Beijing University of Posts and Telekommunications, wnwang@bupt.edu.cn (Weining Wang). Registration form identical to [6] and [10]
2009 IEEE 16th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IE&EM 2009), Beijing Union University	21-23 Oct 2009	[8]	300	1 week	June 25	404 error	No venue information on site, Program still "under construction", Contact is a yahoo address, many topics, foreigners can submit later
2009 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Microwave, Antenna, Propagation and EMC Technologies for Wireless Communications (MAPE 2009), Jingyan Hotel	27-29 Oct 2009	[9]	350	4 1/2 weeks	June 10	$495 / $60	Contact at Beijing Jiaotong University, Venue online, Wide range of topics, "Each article should be within 4 pages, otherwise USD60 will be charged per page of the extra pages of your article. The first author who has 2 papers should pay one registration fee and USD60 per page of the second paper."
2009 IEEE International Conference on Network Infrastructure and Digital Content (IC-NIDC 2009), Academic Communication Center, BUPT	6-8 Nov 2009	[10]	180	3 1/2 weeks	Aug 15	$400 / $50	E-Mail contact Beijing University of Posts and Telekommunications, wnwang@bupt.edu.cn (Weining Wang). Registration form identical to [6] and [7], Registration venue given as Beijing Hotelecom Hotel.

Ms. Weining Wang is listed as the Director of Academic Office, BUPT. She also appears to be the contact for IEEE NLP-EK 2007, IEEE IC-NLP 2005, China-Ireland International Conference on ICT (CIICT2008), the 19th International Teletraffic Congress ITC19, The Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium 2008, ICHS 08, and is Deputy Editor-In-Chief of the Elsevier-published "Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications". Maybe she is the one in the office that speaks English, but I find this mighty strange.

I believe that the conferences [6], [7] and [10] are bogus conferences. [2], [3], and [8] are questionable.

Am I being paranoid here? I wrote to the IEEE president when I published my blog entry on fake conferences, but received no reply. Comments?