Hoover,
Below is a summary of the responses to my request of 27 March 1995:
Hoover Chan asked me to post a summary of the responses to my request
"...for information on experiences in which papers were first accepted and
then the acceptances withdrawn, or in which papers were accepted for a
meeting to which they had not been submitted, without the knowledge of
the authors" (cvnet, 27 March 1995).
I am happy to say that no such experiences were reported. I did receive
two messages offering ways in which an error or misunderstanding on our part
may have accounted for our experience with the "1994 Symposium on Neurobiology
for Young Chinese Scientists." However, we made none of the suggested errors.
One reply cited a case (ICPR-88) in which "...the whole conference was
moved on short notice to Rome, Italy" from Beijing, and none of the
Chinese attended. Another reported that "...hardly any of the Chinese
speakers turned up (at the) 3rd Int Cof Automation, robotics and computer
vision," leaving, in some cases, 2 or 3 speakers out of some 8 scheduled.
Another reported that support by the Peoples Republic of China for a
visiting scholar was "...suddenly terminated without explanation" after 2-3
months of support. Finally, there was a report from a US scientist who was
unable to make a "conference for the International Society for Adaptive
Medicine in Tokyo Japan 1993 (and) the organizers offered to help...by
providing someone to present (the author's) poster."
I report these responses without comment except to point out that my request
merely described two unfortunate incidents and asked for reports of similar
experiences, and that beyond the facts of the examples cited, the request did
not specifically mention international meetings nor any particular country.
Walt Makous