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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.
… Grad school was great [thinks]. Um, no, grad school was not that great. I like to tell my students who start their PhD that there will be times in grad school when it’s really, really hard. I tell them “Just don’t hide if you have a problem. I am here for you. We’ll get you through this”. Nobody told me that.
… [Being a professor] It was the best job in the world for me because, it turns out I don’t do really well with a boss. Academia is one of very few jobs in life where you don’t really have a boss. So, it actually turned out to be a great fit. It brought together the various aspects of me that I was really good at. I’m a people person, I’m an extrovert. But, I’m also a geek. I really enjoy programming and I like technology. Being a professor lets me do those two things.
… I’ve never seen a research problem I didn’t like. I talk to people and they’ll mention things that are interesting. Collaboration is really fun. I’ve got a couple of visualization projects going on, because systems people are often really good at producing interesting data and not very good at helping people use it. I am not somebody who knows how to solve visualization problems, but I can often identify things like, “Ooh, this is really interesting data! I wonder if there’s a way we could make it accessible to people”.
I’m really excited about being able to visualize the data that we use to make intrusion detection systems, because in many cases, you get an alarm that says, “Oh, we think there’s intrusion”. And it’s like, “Why?!” um well because some piece of the software says so. I think it would be really great to give people the mechanism to dig down into it and get a sense of what’s going on. So, that’s been a whole fun area.
… My secret desire is that I want to spend the rest of my career trying to publish in as many different areas of computer science as possible. I’ve got my first PL paper under submission at the moment, but I’ve never published a theory paper. My ML papers have a lot of math in them though. I haven’t published in scientific computing either. So yeah, that’s my new fantasy.
… “Oh, I understand it at this higher level and I actually don’t understand low-level details”. I think that’s a really uncomfortable position for a lot of people, but if you’re going to work across areas, there are going to be some areas where you’re going to have to draw a line and say, “Okay, I can stop here”. I don’t know if this is a skill or a failure of a skill. Often with graduate students, one of the challenges, particularly when I’m encouraging them to do these bold, stupid, audacious (pick your right word) projects is helping them figure out that they don’t need to go all the way down to the bottom on every topic. You need to understand that this is the technology we are going to use. So, you do not need to understand how to develop it from scratch.
If you could revise
the fundmental principles of
computer system design
to improve security...
... what would you change?