In 2018, when I moved from Purdue University in the US to EPFL in Switzerland, I had the opportunity to apply for an ERC H2020 starting grant in computer science. ERC starting grants are similar to the NSF Career award and can be submitted up to 7 years after completing …
read moreOther articles
PhD at EPFL, in Europe
Every December a lot of prospective students reach out to faculty regarding PhD programs. This is the time where we review the students and assess their skills and potential along many dimensions such as past research, research ideas, engineering capabilities, and systems experience. These discussions along with the submission of …
read morePositive reviewing in software security
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 more
Page 1 / 2 »