Too busy to…

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 publication in ACM Crossroads magazine. The topic was using a peer-to-peer network to distribute spam “fingerprints” to allow the detection of junk e-mail — like Vipul’s Razor but using a DHT for distributing the information, and a reputation system based on SECURE.

The editors made some very helpful comments that I think really helped to improve the final version which was good, and while producing the requested XHTML mark-up for submission was an absolute pain compared to LaTeX, it does mean I have a pretty good idea of how the online version will look. The next step is the dreaded copy-editing… It probably won’t be too bad as I know the quality of my writing isn’t great, but the last two articles I’ve been involved with have had quite subtle but serious changes made to them by copy-editors and you have to be very sharp to make sure they don’t change the meaning of something.

The second article I worked on last week was a collaboration with Jm from TCD on raising the level of trust in legacy plain-text e-mail addresses. The techniques we use are quite interesting, and I think fairly novel, although there is an awful lot of literature on spam out there at the moment so it’s hard to keep on top of it all. We submitted to the Privacy, Security and Trust conference in New Brunswick, Canada, so fingers crossed for that one.

Anyway, after all this, I’m quite bored of spam now! Alas, there’s a project deliverable deadline coming up and since the consortium have chosen spam as one of our key applications, I guess my respite will be short lived… 🙁

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 for the IEEE Computer Society. As in my first two years, one of the most fascinating aspects is delving into the inner-workings of the IEEE and the IEEE-CS. Unfortunately as with any large organisation, achieving change, particularly technical change, seems to be something like a black art and it seems odd that something like an online-only magazine so bleeding edge for a computer society. Of course the part of the project that is really bleeding edge is the business model, not the technology, and as a result the technology that runs the site now seems a bit dated compared to the facilities offered by content management systems, and even blogging tools such as wordpress.

Overall, the editorial board were very enthusiastic about my ideas for the site, which included creating some RSS feeds for some of the content and allowing registered users to personalise their view of the site. The plan for discussion boards and allowing slashdot-style comments on stories seems to have disappeared though — people were much more worried about the need for moderating inappropriate (i.e. political) comments than I remember from previous meetings. I’ve never been convinced of the demand for these sorts of services from the IEEE anyway — the sort of content it publishes just doesn’t endear the same sort of debate as the typical slashdot story!

Anyway, how successful I can be at driving major technical change at an organisation as monolithic and remote as the IEEE-CS remains to be seen, but wish me luck!!