A nice perk of starting my full-time position in January is that I have 3 uniterrupted months “off.” I say “off” instead of off because I am not truly without academic responsibility. For example, I participated in a CCC workshop on finding “grand challenges” in Sociotechnical Cybersecurity and am shepherding the writing of one of the four […]
Tag: musings
Grand Challenges in Sociotechnical Cybersecurity: A Recap
Take a step back, and ask yourself: What are the largest societal problems that relate to cybersecurity, today? Depending on your background, you may come with very different answers. Computer security researchers may come up with technical answers relating to formally verifiable code or homomorphic encryption or the structure of the internet. Tech-savvy policy makers […]
The Art of Rebutting
This is a post on how to rebut reviews. Specifically, CHI reviews. The ideas presented here probably apply to rebuttals more broadly, but much of what I’m going to speak about in this post is specific to CHI. Okay, so the long, long — so long — wait is over and you have your CHI […]
Success Spirals: Getting Out of A Rut
Success spirals are powerful, but have downsides. As outlined in the book, The Motivation Hacker, you can only fail at success spirals so many times before your expectancy is permanently damaged [1]. While I have not personally experienced this, it is a possibility that can inhibit my using success spirals when I am only half-committed […]
5 Ph.D. Survival Tips
I recently had to give a short presentation on “survival tips” as a Ph.D. student [1]. I thought I’d summarize that presentation in written form, too. Now, there’s a lot of material out there on how to succeed as an academic and as a professional. This post is going to be a rehashing of those […]
Academia or Industry? A Societally Significant Choice
This is the final installment of a four-part series of posts I’m writing to crystallize my own thoughts on “The Question”: Academia or Industry? The question is framed dichotomously, but what it really is getting at is something deeper: You’ve deferred being an adult for a while now, but what do you want to do […]
Academia or Industry? The “Dichotomy”
So, academia or industry? In a previous post, I explained what that meant and unwrapped all of the hidden options [1]. I feel as though that post was incomplete, though. It was impersonal: just a summary of the choices and how those choices differed along a few dimensions: amenability to Research, pay, intellectual freedom, work/life […]
On this blog
This blog will become great [1]. But this is only my first post, so I thought I’d cover some of my initial motivations for establishing a blog. In a future post, I hope to share more about how I started this blog, if any of you are interested in doing the same (short version: I’m using WordPress on […]