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After been suspended for claiming Python-based Mulan as self-developed, the Chinese researcher Liu Lei received his punishment: He will not be promoted within five years.
On January 23, the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences posted on its website an investigation result on the Mulan programming language, saying that Liu Lei, the main person in charge of the team, had committed false publicity activities and his behavior has also been done without informing the institute.
Therefore, the institute decided to give Liu Lei the following punishments: Cancel the qualifications for the promotion of professional and technical positions within five years; Cancel the qualifications for applications for scientific research projects within three years; Announce criticisms across the institute; Decrease the job level from engineer level to assistant engineer level.
Previously, according to reports from State-owned media including the China News Network, Mulan, a China-made programming language was officially released as the "C language for the intelligent IoT era," a laboratory under the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced on January 15.
The programming language is for intelligent IoT applications, using the latest design concepts and compilation technologies, the State Key Laboratory of Computer Architecture, Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said.
The team also the open source software package for Mulan for global users to download and obtain for free.
But then there was controversy on the Internet, and Mulan was alleged to be "Python for a different skin.”
On January 19, the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued a statement stating that there was a scientific misconduct problem with deceptive and false statements in the conduct, and they made a decision to suspend Liu Lei and will conduct an in-depth investigation into this issue.
The survey and processing opinions released this time show that Liu Lei is an employee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as an engineer who is also the person in charge of the Zhongke Zhixin (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. He lead the team to develop the Mulan language for programming education for young people.
The above results show that Liu Lei's claim that "Associate Researcher Liu Lei" appears in the publicity activities is not consistent with his post.
According to the survey results, the Mulan language is divided into two versions, the team has defined the language specifications, independently developed the compiler, bytecode specifications, and virtual machine. Based on the open source Blockly, it has developed a visual programming environment for young and middle school students, which is relatively systematic and complete.
However, the team declared to the media that "completely independent design" had an exaggerated content, and that it was a false statement that Mulan was "a completely independent design, development, and implementation programming language”.
In addition, claiming that “Mulan is positioned as the development language for the next generation of important Internet of Things applications" lacks the support of application cases, according to the result. It is a false statement that the Mulan language uses an elastic actor execution model and uses data sparsity to improve efficiency.
The survey results also mentioned that "the promotional materials handed over by Liu Lei to the media are seriously inconsistent with the approval materials submitted to our publicity supervisor, which is a deceit.”
The release of a China-made programming language called Mulan has caused quite a stir in recent days. However, it turned out that it was a false publicity by a scholar, and he apologized for it.
However, shortly after the Mulan programming language was released, cnTechPost mentioned that some Zhihu users claim that it now looks like a simplified version of Python. The first version of ulang-0.2.2 was implemented directly with Python.
The said it was actually the Python language with a new appearance. It had the same icons and dialogs as Python, and provided the same functions as Python.
Many developers find that the unpacked Mulan language is actually built on Python, compiling the environment, packages, and projects built by Python into an executable file.
In addition, the Mulan open source software package was not found on the official website of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and GitHub.
After facing numerous questioning online, Liu Lei, the head of the Mulan R&D team, responded on Saturday and apologized for his exaggerated publicity.
