I am near done with my second academic paper. This paper came about in a very unusual way, as opposed to my first one. The first one was created after months of exploration and tweaking along my adviser. We finished it a few months ago, and it is now off to the IEEE Oakland conference in May. Wish me luck. (For anyone interested, it is entitled “Identifying Tipping Points in a Game-Theoretic Model of Network Security”).

My journey towards the second paper began at the very end of the Fall semester, when I severely doubted some conclusions made in the first paper. I shouldn’t have doubted myself; I meticulously reviewed every detail of that paper. Nonetheless, something struck me as not quite right. This was confirmed when I tried to simulate some of the theoretic results from Paper 1. After hours of trying, I simply couldn’t make them match up. Was my simulation wrong? Did I make a typo somewhere?

I brought all of these concerns to my adviser, who was much more logical than I about the situation. Instead of fussing with simulation results for hours, he suggested I try to rebuild the model I took for granted at the start of the paper. After finals and the first round of grad school apps were due, I began to scrap everything and really think the problem through. The first round was pretty rough and consisted of notes scratched on various papers, and half-finished paragraphs in a nameless MS Word document.

However, the act of laying out all these notes was very cathartic. I got a chance to put my thoughts on paper. I wrote everything from possible loose-ends to something that others might call research. When I realized the latter existed, I decided to collect my notes into the document which is (to this day) entitled “2 Draft.” I was on my way! After many, many re-reads and changes in notation, I was finally able to re-create the model that many (<10) people have created before me. Anticlimactic, right?

Despite being disappointed that all I’d done was re-create work, I felt accomplished and able to take on the world. This is where Google Scholar came in. All of those scratched notes with concerns were now validated by reputable academics. I downloaded en-masse tens of papers concerning interdependent security - everything from Nature articles to conference proceedings. I learned a lot from reading these papers and got numerous good ideas from them, which have now been incorporated into “2 Draft.”

It’s funny though; those first few pages were easy to write. The last few were a bit harder, but not much. The introduction, though, is killing me. Re-tooling everything was painful due to Word’s idiosyncrasies (I can’t change the font for equations!). This whole process has been fun, and I can’t wait to submit to a conference (and suggestions?).

I’ve taken away many things: 1) Use LaTex if I was control over my documen, 2) Just start writing and the rest will come, and 3) Always keep a pad handy for random ideas.

(If you want a peek at either paper, email me.)

Thanks