ICISSP at Porto, Portugal

Writing academic papers can be a unique experience. The process is definitely tiring and arduous but I believe the end result of definitely worth it, especially when publishing at conferences. My experience at writing an academic paper began in the Spring quarter of 2016 for a research class where the final project was to write a paper and try to publish it at a conference. Having managed to write the paper by the end of the quarter I tried to publish it at the Moving Target Defense workshop at ACM CCS 2016 and failed spectacularly with all my reviewers giving me a reject. Conference papers are usually reviewed by 3 or more researchers who each offer a decision along with comments.

The most important learning from the failure was that my writing was in-effective at conveying the value of my work. So I spent the first half of the Autumn quarter visiting the writing center every week to get my work reviewed. The feedback that I got from the writing center was the special spice that I need to improve my writing and eventually I managed to get my work accepted at the ICISSP conference which allowed me to visit Portugal for a week.

So in summary, whether you're an undergrad thinking about writing a research paper or a grad student who's forced to do it, definitely give it your best shot and use the resources that UWB offers. If you ever need some help reviewing, brainstorming ideas or just wanna hear some Portuguese travel stories feel free to email me at gautamk@uw.edu and I'd be happy meet up on campus over a nice cup of coffee at Food for thought.

You can read his final academic paper here: https://faculty.washington.edu/lagesse/publications/LimitedCryptTokens.pdf