Research

Reference:

Research impact

Mark Hill, Increasing your research impact.

  • Taxonomies organize a problem or existing solutions into “boxes” that can expose new opportunites. Mendeleev’s Periodic Table that focused efforts on uncovering missing elements.

  • Connections are key to research. Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things.” Don’t unduly worry about dividing credit, but generously share credit as it often multiplies and leads to collaborations that can enable something even more worthwhile. “Sequential Consistency (SC) for Data-Race-Free (DRF) Programs” memory model is the result of a connection between data races and weak/relaxed memory models.

PhD Career suggestions

Getting started as a PhD student. By Matt Welsh.

  • Don’t let school get in the way of your education. Classes and program requirements are important but what is far more important is becoming an expert in your area. If that means taking fewer classes each term so you have time to do some real research, so be it.
  • Just dive in and have no fear.
    • You cannot really understand the problem until you’ve tried to solve it.
    • Just dive in and start doing some research – anything – even if you think it might be a dead end.
  • Don’t read too much at first.
    • The problem with reading too much papers (especially at first) is that it can make it look like all of the interesting problems have already been solved.
    • Certainly you should never read anything from 1960’s or 70’s or you will realize that it all has been done before (LLM: this also means a rich resource of new ideas can come from here!)
    • At some point, say 2 or 3 months into a project – you should take a step back and compare your approach to what has come before, and correct course if necessary.
    • Arguably, all great systems are just reinventing ideas and reevaulating assumptions in light of changing technology trends, but don’t let that stop you. I made my career that way, you can too!
  • Keep track of the papers that you do read.
    • Come up with a good system for tracking the papers you have read, need to read, and take notes on them that you can easily reference later.
    • Printing them out and scribbling in the margions is OK, though there may be more environmentally-friendly approaches.
    • Apply Mac application [Papers], like iPhoto for PDF file.
    • Mendeley, CiteULike, Bibdesk
    • In grad school I just kept a huge text file of every paper I read and my notes on it. When it came time to write my thesis, this was invaluable for putting together the related work list (same for papers I wrote).
  • Finally, take a lot of notes.
    • Hell, I am never going to remember what I told them from one week to the next, so they need to keep track. (LLM: sharing notes for every meeting is good!)

How to have a bad career

Jim Kurose, Pieces of advice I wish my PhD advisor had given me.

The persistence and shouting matches in AI turing awardee

  • “The London-born Dr. Hinton, 71, first embraced the idea as a graduate student in the early 1970s, a time when most artificial intelligence researchers turned against it. Even his own Ph.D. adviser questioned the choice.” > “We met once a week,” Dr. Hinton said in an interview. “Sometimes it ended in a shouting match, sometimes not.”

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  • Bios

    • References: reference More Margo Seltzer References: People of Systems & Architecture: Margo I. Seltzer Career jouney It’s a circuitous journey that had no pre-planning. One of the things that I always tell my graduating students, particularly undergrads, is don’t try to plan out the rest of your life; figure out what you’re doing next. In large part, that’s because I never could have predicted where I ended up.

  • Reading

    • How to read papers: Summarizing 12 months of reading papers. By Alastair Reid, Google. ~100 papers per year. Conference paper collections: ACM OpenTOC More

  • Seminars

    • Reference 1 Oakland 2020 Reference 1 Videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6pXMS7qre9GZW7A7FVM90Q/videos Opening Missing Doug Tygar, from UC berkeley. Awards. 104 out of 8xx. ~12% Mem Safety xMP Data oriented programming xen altp2m ptr -> hash -> key Buddy allocator context switch read-only permissions from outside of xMP domain. Talk with P. seL4: no trust on hardware; verified safe. PSOS: layer ontop of layer; verify one layer ontop of a verified layer. CHERI: security in market in 3~4 years.

  • Paper Writing

    • UChicago: The Craft of Writing Effectively Valuable to the audience Valueable is determined by people people in and out over time, knowledge in and out over time. knowledge will be ‘abondoned’ after it is done. What make it be important? Words: neitherless, however, although, inconsistent, reported, … Words creating value to the readers. Words signaling community: widely, reported, … Words for flow/transition: and, but, however, Words for Instability (tension/contradiction): anomaly, inconsistent, but, however, The code shared in the community to create values.

  • Conferences

    • Security and System Conferences Traditions Deadlines: conferences +/- 1 month January: SP, ATC, CCS, Feburary: UsenixSec-4, SP, CCS March: SP, April: SOSP, SP, SecDev May: UsenixSec-1, OSDI, SP, CCS, June: NDSS, July: POPL, August: UsenixSec-2, CCS, ASPLOS, Asia CCS September: NDSS, October: EuroSP, November: UsenixSec-3, VEE, DAC, PLDI, PLDI, EuroSys, December: AsiaCCS, DSN, SP, Upcoming Conference Paper/notifcn Poster Date & Location SP’21 Dec 3 / Feb 19 May 23-27, 2021 San Francisco, CA SP’21 Sep 3 / Nov 20 May 23-27, 2021 San Francisco, CA SP’21 Jun 13, 1st / Feb 1st May 23-27, 2021 San Francisco, CA ACSAC’20 Jun 12, 2020 December 7-11, 2020, Austin, Texas Passed Dues Conference Paper/notifcn Poster Date & Location SecDev’20 May 25, 2020 Sep 28-30, 2020.

  • Job Choices

    • References: Job and Career Advice A connection on LinkedIn asked me for help deciding between job offers. I can’t provide personalize advice, but here are my thoughts in general. 在LinkedIn上有朋友私信让我帮他在几个工作offer之间做出选择。虽然我不能

Created Aug 12, 2019 // Last Updated May 18, 2021

If you could revise
the fundmental principles of
computer system design
to improve security...

... what would you change?