Too busy to... » Research

Death by laser pointer

Nathan — Thu, 26 May 2005 11:52:55 +0000

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 speaker to turn their back to his/her audience so they can point at the screen;
a bright spot whizzing around the screen in a random manner is very distracting.

I think a more fundamental problem is that the ability to point at one’s slides also encourages the speaker to talk to the slides rather than using them as a visual aid supporting one’s talk.

Thesis Submission!

Nathan — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 13:43:53 +0000

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, but for the moment I am looking forward to a bit of a rest and preparing for my trip to Australia.

The final word count was 42,776. Many thanks to everyone who proof-read chapters for me!

Searching the ACM Guide to Computing Literature

Nathan — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 15:53:45 +0000

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 as the first hit.

Given the simplicity of the the query (four keywords from the title of a paper published in an ACM proceedings), I really don’t understand why the search engine is so bad. My current workaround is to use Firefox’s bookmark keyword feature to search Google instead. Just create a bookmark to:
http://www.google.com/search?&q=site:acm.org%20%s
set the keyword to be something easy to type like “acm”, and then typing “acm ” in the location bar executes your search.

Thesis Titles

Nathan — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 17:17:27 +0000

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 Control in Global Computing
Trust- and Risk-Based Access Control: Access Control for the Global Computing Infrastructure
Trust/Risk-Based Access Control: Access Control for Global Computing

I doubt this will make much sense to anyone reading this but comments always welcome.

Boy Band filter — Coming to a computer near you soon?

Nathan — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 21:24:38 +0000

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 as freedb.org. A trust-based system would allow a user to favour entries submitted by authors they have previously to provide consistently formatted and accurate data.

Thesis Writing

Nathan — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 15:18:56 +0000

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 next week!

Thesis Update

Nathan — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 17:00:12 +0000

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 myself up for writing the rest.

The thesis graph is proving a rather useful tool for self-motivation — and gives me something to talk about when people invariably ask how it’s going!

Merry Christmas.

ACM Guide to Computing Literature

Nathan — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 16:15:43 +0000

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 got it.

Enter the ACM Guide to Computing Literature which has one feature which makes it singularly more useful than any digital library and Google Scholar — BibTeX data!

It’s not entirely clear what The Guide indexes besides ACM and IEEE publications, but since this covers a large proportion of my reading list, it’s still very useful.

Write-Up and Thesis

Nathan — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 14:11:24 +0000

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 next year are taking shape. If I can make some good progress on the thesis between now and Christmas (I intend to be in Cambridge until Christmas eve to make sure this happens!), then a trip “down under” seems very likely. It’s all very exciting.

Google Scholar

Nathan — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 11:22:36 +0000

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!