My critique of GAO style academic production

GAO is in a state of reverence when appreciating dizzying arrays of mathematical theorems and proofs. Only if we could stuff out papers with such eloquently packed maths stuff, he said, then reviewers would think we are freaking serious researchers with worthy nerdiness and respectable background from some form of serious engineering and applied maths. Even high school trained eyes can see his last page of equations are nothing but mundane transformations of Gaussian distribution.

In the end, GAO is not doing science or doing science any favour, he is merely a opportunistic academic punter who use the convenience of existing academic foundation and tricks and short cuts to advance his own agenda/career through opportunistic paper pumping. Sadly it could be said for most academics. There isn't a mechanism for encouraging original thinking. It just happened that the best and optimum way for him to gain academic position/reputation and publication are through clever implementation derived merging of two tpami-worthy ideas: line based structures and edge map based distance calculation. Mixing these application level engineering principle together and you get an application level idea. The fact that his classmate recommended his paper for publication didn't hurt either. Otherwise it's probably just a PR level publication. Enough for singapore's superficial universities.