Today, I will talk about the MDLM 2023 conference (International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining). Several years ago, I have attended MLDM 2016 (report here) because at that time it was published by Springer. But I was unhappy that the MLDM conference was advertised as being held in New York, while it was finally held in a small hotel 40 minutes away in another city called Newark, close to nothing. And that conference was really expensive at around 650 euros… I have thus never attended that conference again, but I have observed that during the following years, that conference was still advertised as being in New York, while being held in that same hotel in Newark every year (see my blog post about MLDM 2019). Thus, I never submitted a paper again to that conference, and I also observed that it is not published by Springer anymore (it might be because of that). This for me is another reason to not publish there anymore.
Why I talk about MDLM 2023? Because, this year I received a comment on my blog reporting that the conference was not even held and that people went to Newark and found that there was no conference at all! Here is the comment that report this:
And a related tweet:
I did not verify whether this comment is true, but I believe that it is, given that this MLDM conference has repeatedly mislead people about the location of the conference.
Update 2023-10: And here is another comment that I just received on this blog that also had a similar bad experience with MLDM 2023:
By looking at the Internet Wayback Archive, I can see that the conference website of MLDM 2023 still advertised the conference as being in New York:
But when we click on “Location”, as usual, we find that it is not in New York city but instead in the city of Newark:
For those who are not familiar with the map of US, Newark and New York are two cities from two different states:
Thus, these two cities should not be confused!
This blog post is just to give an update about this MLDM conference.
If you have any information about this MLDM 2023 conference and whether it was really held or not or have any other interesting experience to share, please leave a comment below.
Our research team also had the same experience this year. We sent 2 papers, we paid for them and then, when we tried to contact that lady (the organizer) about further information about the venue of the conference (we sent around 20 Email and gave plenty of phone calls), she just disappeared.
Waste of time, money and especially effort (our papers have never been published), plus the frustration she caused to us!!!
Is there any way of taking any legal action against her and her organization?
K.P
Thanks for sharing your experience.
That is very unfortunate. :-/
Professor Philippe,
No one would list New York, NY as a location when the conference was held in Newark, NJ, a very high-crime, deindustrialized city.
The conference organizer is Petra Perner. Her ORCID lists her as the director of the Institute of Computer Vision and Applied Computer Sciences in Germany, known as IBaI which you mentioned. However, all URLs to ibai websites via WikiCFP, ORCID, IEEE, and even Google search return 403 forbidden or 404 errors. In her various bios, Petra Perner claims to have earned her EE degree in 1981 and PhD degree in CS in 1985, but never states what college or university. Her only employment is listed as IBaI institute director since 1995.
MLDM conference proceedings haven’t been published by Springer since the 14th MLDM in 2018, and DBLP doesn’t even list any after 2019. On the MLDM WikiCFP page (long URL) there are MLDM conferences listed for 2020 (despite COVID19!), 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. I can’t find any indication that they took place.
Petra is now affiliated with a EU digital business and marketing conference (!) nextconf.eu She is on twitter as sciencepp where she mostly lists the dates of MLDM conferences.
Yes, I think MDLM 2023 and 2024 were scams, and would be extremely careful about any future MDLM conferences.