2

By day I am employed (as a research engineer) at CEA, LIST in France (near Paris) working (in 2020) on Bismon (funded by CHARIOT, about cybersecurity). My work contract is under French law (legally some contrat de travail à durée indeterminée) and I am a French citizen.

On my spare time, at home only and with my personal computer equipment, I am developing with others the RefPerSys open source artificial intelligence system.

We would like to submit some paper about it to ICAAINN 2021 (a conference in Paris, France).

The conference submission website requires mentioning some institution.

I don't want to mention my employer for something I am not paid for doing.

If the paper was accepted I have both enough money and enough vacation to go presenting it.

What institution should I put in the web form for something done at home (and improving my old PhD ideas)?

anpami
  • 8,704
  • 1
  • 20
  • 56
Basile Starynkevitch
  • 1,741
  • 12
  • 13
  • 6
    This is most certainly a duplicate, but I didn't find the previous question. Anyway, the answer is that you put "Independent Researcher" in that text field. – Arno Nov 29 '20 at 11:21
  • However you handle the affiliation issue, make sure that any email address you give (that might appear in the published work) is one that you will be able to keep active. Some professional societies will provide you an email address. acm.org does, for example. – Buffy Nov 29 '20 at 14:36
  • @buffy: I own and pay for the starynkevitch.net DNS domain, and my personal email is basile@starynkevitch.net since more than a decade – Basile Starynkevitch Nov 29 '20 at 14:41
  • 1
    Make that your affiliation. But maybe buff up your landing page. – Buffy Nov 29 '20 at 14:42
  • The mentioned conference falls under the auspices of WASET, which has a terrible reputation. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Academy_of_Science,_Engineering_and_Technology If I were you, I'd choose a different venue. –  Nov 30 '20 at 10:17
  • Thanks a big lot for that advice! – Basile Starynkevitch Nov 30 '20 at 10:20

1 Answers1

3

"Independent Scholar" or "Independent Researcher" is the way to go (as also mentioned by Arno in the comments).

According to LENS, the affiliation "Independent Scholar" seems to be slightly more prevalent than "Independent Researcher", with 3.085 versus 2.426 occurrences between 2015 and the end of Nov. 2020.

(Just for the record, the term "Independent Scientist" was used only 31 times in the same date range; and the earlier centuries' label "Gentleman Scientist" seems to be completely outdated by now.)

Here at Academia StackExchange, there is also an independent-researcher tag (here).

anpami
  • 8,704
  • 1
  • 20
  • 56