CSC295.02 2013S, Class 12: Peter Likarish '04 Overview: * Journey so far Admin: Journey so far * High school was an IB program, with emphasis of learning across disciplines * Swam at Grinnell - "Swimming is, by nature, asocial; in the subaquatic realm, the human ... * After Grinnell, got a Master of Science in Creative Writing at Edinburgh (only twelve months; an opportunity to be abroad) * Got some publications - "When you wake up", "Triune" * Then spent time getting his Ph.D. at UIowa. [Visit!] * Thesis: Early Detection of Malicious Web Content with Applied Machine Learning * You need to contribute some work of original scholarsihp that advances knowledge * Good things about grad school in CS: You're being paid to think. * But you're thinking A LOT and not many people know what you're doing. * Now at Drew Question: How did you choose a grad school, adviser, topic, etc. * Iowa gave him the best offer * You should choose the best place (perhaps even if you're only admitted as a master's student) * He really liked his advisor and his thesis topic * You should talk to your faculty; also look at rankings * The reputation of the department is important * The reputation of your advisor is also important * In terms of his particular topic, he was interested in security, and came up with the idea (with his advisor) of trying Bayesian analysis to classify Web pages as phishing or non-phishing. She then pushed him to go further. * Do something you're interested in, but also look to what will interest other people. * Wishes he'd try to join his interests earlier. Only started doing interdisciplinary work in his later years. * But people might wonder about what you're doing Research on World of Warcraft * Research done at parc * Can we go from WoW character back to gender, age, etc? * IARPA (Intellgence Agencies Research Projects Administration) funded * Negotiating dealing with funders whose goals you may not agree with * parc - Research thingy in Bay Area (was Xerox Parc) * PARC created lots of great products, but Xerox failed to capitalize on most of them * Lots of really smart people * And PARC has internships * Back to the research * What data do you gather: Gender, weapons, pets, race (e.g., night elf), guild, do they do player-vs-player combat or player-vs- npc combat, how many hours per week, ....? * Bots monitor them to find out some of this info * They also had real life data for for things like real gender, age, etc. (With their permission * Can we give them another vector of data and make a prediction? And how good is the prediction. * Lots of interesting outcomes: E.g. characters played by men tend fo fall to their death. (or, characters that die by falling tend to be played by men.) * No hard and set rules for how you do all of this * Got lots of suggstions from people with domain knowledge- ohow much time do they spend testing, .... Collaborative Fiction Project * Get ordinary people to contribute to a novel over Twitter * "Oulipo" - (potential literature) - the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy - Even if you've never written, you can participate in the writing process - A chance to get the conscious brain out of the way; use the unconscious brain * Exquisite corpse - story or a drawing. Everybody contributes without knowing what everyone else is doing. * Their goal - combine this with new technologies (e.g, Twitter) - How do you create something new over Twitter * There was a Web site where you could see what was happening * Searching for the hashtag only gave you the last three or four contributions - like an exquisite corpse * Done the experiment twice - once in Iowa City, once (somewhere else) Over 100 contributors, over 900 contributions, many they didn't know * Ad hoc consensus * http://tynesidenovel.com/ * My students want to know if he does something like this again * He would also be willing to provide resources to so something similar here Question: How does the English contribute to his CS? * He writes faster and better than his peers Advice: Don't let the prefect be the enemy of the good Advice: Be friends with someone who is not in CS, but who likes to think deeply Advice: If you want to go into academia, be interesting. Practice that elevator pitch to capture somebody's attention Advice: If you don't want to go into academia, be interesting. Advice: Find an advisor you trust and who believes in you Advice: Realize that in some fields there aren't many jobs for Ph.D.'s Advice: Malcolm Gladwell's 10K hrs (if you spend 10K hours on something, you should get pretty good at it) Advice: Spend time in a startup-rich environment Question: Why was your thesis under embargo?