GREPSEC and SOUPS 2023

I am so tired

• I did the thing where you travel from one part of the United States to the next, and am pretty tired. I already have a bunch of meetings and things to get done, but I would like to spend some time tomorrow afternoon just resting, because I haven’t really had time off in a while. So we’ll see how that goes. I’m really just doing my best right now.

I went to GREPSEC and SOUPS this week!

• GREPSEC is meant as a mentorship workshop with talks that range on everything from privacy, security, usability, programming languages, etc. I even met someone who was working on adversarial models for AI, so there’s that kind of work, too! (in fact, the Distinguished Usenix paper this year was on Glaze, the watermarking mechanism for AI art). The participants (apparently a LOT of people applied!) ranged from persons working at the intersection of HCI and privacy, security, cryptography, and a number of things like that, so it was a pretty awesome experience. There were also break-out sessions that discussed topics like how to deal with paper rejections, and about the academic or industry market, and we also had speed-mentoring sessions, which ranged from switching every five minutes to a new mentor, or 20 minutes! All were incredibly great. I even attended a talk at GREPSEC where the speaker basically (it was relayed to me by a friend) told me that a question I asked and some observations I made should be a paper, and the speaker gave me references and other papers to look at. I think I just need to start a lab because I feel like I always have too many directions for ideas of things to do, and I can’t do them all. Maybe one day! And it would be nice to see students who are interested sort of run with those ideas or modify them or do experimentation, etc. We shall see.
• One of the quotes I wrote down is that “security is the control of information, and therefore power”
• We also had the opportunity to also attend SOUPS, so I did that also, and all the talks were so interesting! There was also a session after grepsec / soups on prism, which is focused on security and privacy for vulnerable populations. This was also really interesting, and was headed by a gentleman who gave the first keynote at GREPSEC, and I really enjoyed his talk!
• In terms of the people, they were all really nice and I think I was notified that I added over 20 people just this week to my network, because I just met so many amazing people. What I liked is that it also justified for me that there is important work being done at these sorts of intersections that I think about a lot, coming from certain environments.
• Through the mentorship, I also got a lot of affirmation that I can publish across related fields. In the past, I’ve gotten some backlash / gatekeeping for even suggesting that, but I realize now that that is just insecurity by usually other grad students (and that’s on them). Professors publish across fields all the time, and they are no less worthy in one field versus the other. I liked the way one professor put it, which is that she just likes to pursue interesting problems. I feel the same, and I really dislike the whole “stay in your lane” vibe, which usually is more of an “insecure grad student” vibe, so as a professor advised “is it from grad students? Just ignore it!”. I have to remind myself that often it is grad students struggling with who they are, their own insecurities and grappling with a lot of these things in this space called grad school. It shouldn’t affect my excitement or love for a topic.
• I read a really great quote on reddit this week about having the audacity to do things. Sometimes there is insecurity that arises because a person may feel that if they can’t put someone else down to make themselves feel tall, they can’t exist in a space. And that’s really rotten because it is at the expense of often an unwilling party; no one wants to be put down by someone else so that that someone can feel better or show up another person (whatever that means). So the existence of a constant underclass in the lab that that person can point to in their feelings of ineptitude and say “well, at least I’m not like X person / group” can make for a toxic environment.
• I am of the belief that different people can be good at different things, so writing off a person entirely is not something I have the headspace for. Savants exist in the world, and persons don’t often find the same problems / questions interesting in research. Also, people can get better at things, too; I thought of all places that research would be the space where getting better at things over a period of time (I mean, the goal of a PhD is to learn how to become a researcher!) is encouraged. However, it’s really surprising and a bit upsetting how much of the institutional structure is placed on people who give the appearance of just having a knack / talent for it (which often is the result of having just started earlier or being invested in at an earlier stage / more by faculty, having lineage parents in academia, etc). Also, the grant structure (all of them; NSF, tech companies) also put initiatives in place that also reward this structure of succeeding early rather than rewarding say, someone who performs exponentially well as they progress in their journey.
• It was uncanny that that topic came up because I watched “The Hunger Games” for the first time (yeah, I’m one of those people who watches things years after the hype), and so much of the movie (I haven’t read the book yet!) was about this motif of natural talent and the expectation of success based on things like higher rating, being “good with a bow and arrow”, etc. I won’t spoil it, but I’m happy that some of those expectations were also broken, too, in the movie; it wasn’t a cut and dry case that the only person who was expected early-on to succeed did, and I think that’s very much like the PhD journey. You’re flipping a coin on who will be a great researcher, on some level, in spite of various indicators at the beginning of the journey. So it brings into question how we are even evaluating people early on.
• Anyways, I think I stumbled upon a documentary about Slash (yes, the guitarist) this week, and he was not into guitar until he found a path to it, and then, as he said “that was it”. That can often happen for a person, and seeing a person discover that is really a beautiful thing, and it definitely may not “come early”.

Here are some photos of my time

• Very nice! And the spelling is even correct!

• I couldn’t with all of this all over. Creeped me out a bit.

• On my first day, this guy working at the hotel gave me all the dibs on good food places! I appreciated that so much! The staff is always awesome and will give you all the files if you’re nice to them!

• Apparently we had a pool and a hot tub. But I was just going to the workshops and then to bed and doing work in-between for the time. I did spend an afternoon checking out the fireworks at the park, though!

• View from where I stayed. I couldn’t see the fireworks from here, but I did on the last day! I could usually hear them every evening, though, from around 9:30pm to 10:30pm.

• A beautiful fountain by the conference centre. My friend Josephine and I walked over there on the afternoon of grepsec and hung out a bit. It was a beautiful day. I’m thankful for the nice people there, including her; she was lovely!

• The conference centre. This is not actually where it was held, but I didn’t now and on the first day wandered over by accident to a coffee conference, which is not a bad thing to wander into by accident (I don’t drink coffee ordinarily; I’m a tea person btw).

• Omgggg. This speaker had a talk on Privacy Engineering and spoke about PETS, and each dog or cat had a label, like Differential Privacy, SMPC, etc. I loved it! I later sat next to him at lunch and he remembered the question I asked in the workshop! We had a great chat until I remembered I was ten minutes late for speed-mentoring, so I had to leave.

• Okay, so when I lived in LA, there was this restaurant on Vine. They described it as “A Japanese restaurant with a club vibe” hahaha. Honestly, back in the day, it was sort of just a place young people would go to eat, and I remember having a nice lunch / dinner with my friend, Dee, on her birthday (we celebrated together, as we are both around the same time of year). It was such a staple of my time in LA, but it is no longer on Vine. So I was looking one night to see what food is in the area and spotted one in Brea! So for old times’ sake, I decided to order. Someone at the conference asked me if it was as good as I remembered, and I said not really, but it was still pretty good! It’s one of the things I really remember about my time in LA; it was a place we’d go for a treat or special occasions, and there as a place called Zen Zoo next door that had boba, so we’d go get boba afterwards! Zen Zoo is no longer there, either. Also, there was a Borders bookstore on the corner (which I think is now a Walgreens or something).

• Fantastic talk on domestic partner abuse and privacy.

• Great talk on via indicators, which can show when email is “phishy” versus from a third-party, like how a bank might outsource to Mailchimp to send emails to their customers, and how this can be verified, so that customers know when email is legit or not.

• Our keynote was by a lawyer talking about privacy policy and how much data is revealed, leaked and implications to law.

• She also spoke about privacy by design.

• In the evening, there was an amazing reception with kind of a habachi thing going on with scallops and I ate about a plate of dinner’s worth so I didn’t have to buy dinner and was full by the time I returned to my room (hashtag grad student hack lololol).

• The portabello mushrooms were amazing here. Someone thought it was steak, and I told her and she regretted the past two days not taking some! I’m so thankful they were really cognizant about dietary needs of persons.

• Yay!

• More Yay! I finally got to meet some of the organizers! Really lovely people!

• Kevin’s talk was so amazing! He heads the PRISM group on Security and Privacy for Vulnerable populations.

• What can I say? I’m a grad student; we love good food! I’m also super into healthy stuff. I don’t think being a grad student means you should eat junk because that stuff adds up later in life in terms of health issues, so we are about eating healthily and encouraging that. Plus health insurance is usually not great as a grad student, so taking care of your teeth and eyes and ears and stuff is important.

• Yay! Someone had a talk on Programming languages and verification! I asked a question about proof assistants, too, during the Q and A, and I got to talk with her as she mentored me later on, too (twice!). I LOVED chatting with her! She was so inspiring and very hard-nosed about my ability to make it in the field and succeed. Love that and needed that so much!! Yes, I’m learning Lean now; no one can stop me! And I’m having FUN and being encouraged and supported (I even got a fellowship to attend a workshop coming up!) I too can do proof assistant stuff; it’s not just for people doing programming languages research! I think that this (telling others it’s okay and can be applicable to their research areas) should be encouraged rather than gatekeeping people (this is what I do, not you). Someone legit did that to me for AI, too, early in grad school. Looking back, I experienced some pretty terrible stuff, and people keep apologizing that I had such a terrible experience from some of my peers, but I’m at the stage now where after perspevering and getting advice from others, I realize that it wasn’t me!

• We love her! She’s awesome!!! She used her formal methods background to do research in privacy and security, and I think that’s cool! She was SUCH a good mentor to me, too!

• A talk on creepy and problematic web ads! This was a great talk, too!

• Haha more of that awesome mushroom!

• We stan you mushroom!

• The PRISM team, including Elissa Redmiles and Kevin Butler. Such a great initiative! Security and Privacy for Vulnerable populations! I love that they include this as part of the community, rather than shouldering the responsibility only on persons who are members of those community. I think the work coming out of this field will be better because of it! Roya gave an awesome talk on VPNs, for example, and how it affects vulnerable populations’ security.

• Part of the park on my walk to find fireworks

• It’s telling me I need to check out in a few hours. I was doing laundry and working through Lean homework, as well as doing some research stuff in the background while this popped up. I thought it was a neat touch!

• This is in the Santa Ana airport. I apologize that I did not catch the artists’ names, but please do go visit it, and promote their work! I thought it was so beautiful!

Tired

• I am pretty tired right now, and have a number of things in the works. I am reviewing things, working on a bunch of research projects, taking a class in Lean for which I will be working on a small project involving Maths proofs (translation into Lean), and generally recovering from my trips. I will be leaving in two weeks also to start working with another group on another research project. Fortunately, the last place I went had laundry, so I came back with clean clothes, which is a lot better than how I left (I didn’t have time to complete my drying cycle for my laundry so basically stuffed a garbage bag full of drenched (but washed) clothes that were half-dry into a suitcase, which was such a hot mess!). So that’s kind of my life right now. I missed my friend’s wedding online because I was too tired. I’m sorry ugggh!
• Right now, I’m just doing my best, but over the next few days, there should be a degree of normalcy as I sort things out before heading out again.

And that’s it