Becoming a Researcher Presentation/Resources

Becoming a Researcher: Practical Strategies for Taming the Angst and Changing the World

Jeanna Neefe Matthews

https://tinyurl.com/becomingareseacher

Slides and Video

Sample slides: English and Spanish .
Video: Here is a video recording of one version of this talk given at Clarkson University on April 29 2014.

Where Given

This talk has been offered many times around the world through programs like the ACM Distinguished Speaker Program, and the Fulbright specialist program in places like:

2019 Open Innovations Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, October 2019.
Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia, March 28 2019.
Universidad Icesi, Cali, Colombia, March 27 2019.
Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, March 19 2019.
Universidad del Quindío, Aremia, Colombia, March 16 2019.
Universidad de La Habana, Habana, Cuba, December 6 2017.
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA, April 28 2017.
International Conference on Computing Research and Innovation (Cori2016), University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, September 7 2016.
Chile-WIC, Santiago, Chile, August 12 2016 .
LaGuardia Community College, Queens, New York, USA, May 25 2016.
2014 USENIX Women in Advanced Computing Summit (WiAC 2014), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 18 2014.
Women in Cybersecurity Conference, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, April 11-12 2014. Slides (PDF) .
IUCEE DST Research Academy Workshop, CR Rao Institute, Hyderabad, India, March 18-20 2013. Slides (PDF) .

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Examples of learning research methods from a paper in addition to research results

Measuring the Practical Impact of DNSSEC Deployment, Lian et al., USENIX Security 2013.
"Answering these questions requires taking measurements from a large number of clients. We gathered our clients by purchasing ad space from an online advertising network; the ad network enabled us to host an ad at a fixed URL which would be loaded in an iframe on various publishers' web sites."

PharmaLeaks: Understanding the Business of Online Pharmaceutical Affiliate Programs, McCoy et al., USENIX Security 2012.
"Our use of found data creates two new concerns that we address here: authenticity and ethics. Through these channels we obtained access to three transactional data sets: the complete dump, covering four years, of the GlavMed and SpamIt back-end database (comprising transactions, payments and so on) and a year of more restricted transactional data for the RX-Promotion program. We also received two metadata corpuses: detailed archived chat logs from the program operator for sites operated by GlavMed and SpamIt, as well as financial data concerning the revenue and cost structure for the RX-Promotion program. For further context and back-story about this data, we refer readers to Pharma series by Brian Krebs."

Show Me the Money: Characterizing Spam-advertised Revenue , Kanich et al., USENIX Security 2011.
"We collected order data in two manners: actively via our own purchases and opportunistically, based on the purchases of others. First and foremost are our own purchases, which we conducted in two phases. The first phase arose during a previous study, during which we executed a small number of test purchases from numerous affiliate programs in January and November of 2010 using retail Visa gift cards. Of these, 46 targeted the ten programs under study in this paper. The second phase (comprising the bulk of our active measurements) reflects a regimen of purchases made over three weeks in January and February 2011 focused specifically on the ten programs we identified above."

Dirty Jobs: The Role of Freelance Labor in Web Service Abuse , Motoyama et al., USENIX Security 2011.
"Using over seven years of data from the popular crowd- sourcing site Freelancer.com, as well data from our own active job solicitations, we characterize the labor market involved in service abuse."

An Analysis of Underground Forums , Motoyama et al., ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2011.
"In this study we have the luxury of ground truth - complete records of six underground forums via SQL dumps of their underlying databases. We do not claim that these six are representative of all underground forums, but they provide us with a starting point for understanding the dynamics of underground forums. Each of these datasets has been acquired by unknown outside parties and made ) via various methods. Each forum contains a wealth of information: user registration data, private messages exchanged, forum posts, member status changes, banned user logs, etc. For a more comprehensive list of the available data, please refer to the Invision Power Board (for L33tCrew) and vBulletin database schemas."