Yesterday we concluded the NDSS20 PC meeting. In total, 12% of papers were accepted, 6% now have a short fuse major revision opportunity, in line with other top tier conferences. The PC chairs handled the meeting well, striving for positivity and feedback for the authors. Overall, this was a great …
read moreHow not to alienate your reviewers, aka writing a decent rebuttal
Assuming you have given everything to write the best and most beautiful paper you can ever create, it is obvious that the reviewers must see your points and therefore write you a favorable review with a recommendation of strong accept. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and reviewers may …
read moreNSF TTP Proposal: Prototype Shepherding
After serious advertising of the NSF TTP program at several conferences throughout last year, I've decided to submit to the NSF TTP program last fall. The NSF TTP program is supposed to help transition research into practice, either by forming a company to commercialize a prototype or by developing a …
read moreThe PC Experience
Program Committee (PC) meetings are this mysterious event where the fate of our research projects is decided based on a review of our paper submission. Especially for beginning researchers (i.e., PhD students) it is unclear how the evaluation and review process actually works. From a student's perspective, a paper …
read moreOn collaborative (remote) paper writing
Writing scientific conference or journal papers is an art by itself. This article is not about writing great papers as there already are many good articles that focus on paper writing itself and cover technical aspects, structural aspects, or writing style aspects. In this article I want to give an …
read moreSurviving your first non-virtual program committee meeting
Robots, wildlife and bioinspiration
Sangbae Kim, professor in mechanical engineering from MIT visited Berkeley today and gave a great inspiring talk on dynamic locomotion. The original title of the talk was "Toward Highly Dynamic Locomotion: Actuation, structure and control of the MIT cheetah robot".
An early model of the cheetah robot. Image (c) biomimetics …
read morePhD: expectations and reality
read moreIntroduction
Deciding to do a PhD is a huge commitment as you are just dedicating a couple of years of your life to a single cause. When I decided to do a PhD in 2006 I was not completely sure what would expect me. I just finished my master of …
Bootstrapping at UC Berkeley
An expats start as a security postdoc at UC Berkeley
read moreWhat is this blog post all about (aka tl;dr)?
This post covers our first two weeks in Berkeley, California and includes our struggles to find reasonable housing, a car, pitfalls with Visa requirements, how to get a driving license, and generally how to start a new life in the …