It seems that people have now been using Powerpoint for sufficiently long that “Death by Powerpoint” is a rare event at conferences these days. Alas, this morning I felt the life being sucked from me by misuse of a laser pointer.
The two most obvious problems that inflict laser pointing users are that:
it causes the [...]
I actually finished binding the third copy of my thesis at 15:55 yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, this being Cambridge, the Board of Graduate studies closes at 4pm so I had to wait until this morning to actually submit my thesis… but now it’s DONE! I shall have to prepare for the viva at some point, [...]
Tracking down references for my background chapter recently, the ACM Guide to Computing Literature has been very useful. Unfortunately its search feature is frustratingly useless. For example, searching for Access Control Policies XPath returns no hits, whereas googling for the same terms and restricting the search to acm.org returns the paper I was looking for [...]
Apparently the title of my thesis has to be fixed in advance of my submitting the dissertation itself. Unfortunately choosing exactly the right title is proving harder than writing the thing!
Possibilities are:
Trust and Risk in Access Control for Global Computing
Trust and Risk in Access Control for a Global Computing Infrastructure
Using Trust and Risk for Access [...]
Christophe Rhodes’ interesting JCSS talk on detecting musical structure has suggested that there is hope that one day computers may be able to automatically detect and filter out boy band music — yay!
More relevantly for my own research, one of Christophe’s motivations is the poor quality of musical meta-data from collaboratively assembled databases such [...]
Today’s Piled Higher and Deeper is particularly apt for me at the moment!
Progress on actual writing has stalled for the moment: this week I’ve spent a lot of time supervising, generating results graphs and producing the camera-ready version of a paper for iTrust. Hopefully my word count will start moving (upwards!) again [...]
Today, my last work day before Christmas, I gave a draft of chapters 3, 4 and 5 of my thesis to my supervisor! This was pretty much what I was aiming for, so I’m quite happy and feel I can let myself have a week or so off now to relax and psych [...]
I recently blogged about Google Scholar. While this is a great tool for finding interesting papers, I also seem to spend a lot of time trying to find the relevant meta-data for a paper someone has sent or given me, or I’ve just had lieing around for a few months and forgotten from where I [...]
So, two particularly good things happened to me this week:
I was offered a job! It’s at a large investment bank based in Canary Wharf, and since I really liked the company, and the people I met when I went to interview there, I think I shall probably accept.
I started writing my thesis.
So… plans for [...]
Another great tool from my favourite search engine company: Google Scholar. Similar to citeseer, Google Scholar only indexes academic papers but is broader in scope than just scientific literature, and given Google’s track record, hopefully won’t suffer from citeseer’s chronic availability problems!
I’ve felt for sometime that the biggest obstacle to securing computer systems that have to be used by ordinary users is the human-computer interface, and this was one of the key aspects of our paper Trust for transparent, ubiquitous collaboration. Security is often in direct conflict with usability as by definition “security” means denying a [...]
I’ve grown rather sceptical about attending seminars lately as often about half way through I find myself thinking that the time might be better spent reading the associated paper instead! However I am rather tempted to attend the following:
Wed 27th October: What every Computer Scientist Needs to Know about Software Licenses — Andrew [...]
From join-the-dots:
One of the lesser-known facts about academia is that the summer is far more conducive to research than any other time of year.
Related to this seems to be the fact that there are an awful lot of conference paper submission deadlines around September time. In my field of interest, PerCom and TRECK are this [...]
No, this isn’t a rant about the vast amounts of unsolicited junk I receive on a daily basis, it’s about two research papers I have recently written on anti-spam tools.
Last week I learnt that a paper I had written based on the work of one of my part II project students had been accepted for [...]
Earlier this week I attended the Editorial Board meeting of the IEEE’s first online-only magazine, DS Online.
This is the third year I have attended this annual meeting of editors and volunteers and as ever they were a fun and interesting group of people who are very committed to making this bleeding edge project a success [...]