Stefan Savage

*Please note: this CyLab seminar is open only to partners and Carnegie Mellon University faculty, students, and staff.

Speaker:
Stefan Savage
Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California San Diego

Talk Title:
Inside-out and backwards: a retrospective look at how measurement research really happens

Abstract:
Measurement research is commonly presented in finished form, with each finding leading clearly and cleanly to the next, as natural and expected as night following day. This narrative, whether in writing or speech, exists to support the research's rhetorical goal -- framing the problem and the measurements in a way that highlights the insight being presented. However, this is not how such research actually happens. Measurement research does not spring into existence like Botticelli's Venus, fully formed and without blemish, but is inevitably a complex combination of semi-random exploration, hard work, serendipity and a variety of exogenous factors that defy any clean and clear generalization. Researchers new to the process thus can despair that the "dumpster fire" that they see in their own research process will never produce the perfection seen in others' paper, not realizing that in fact even the most celebrated research has similarly chaotic underpinnings. In this talk, I will explore this reality by pulling back the curtain on my own experience and exploring the unfiltered history of how a variety of my more successful research projects actually happened and the lessons that I tried to extract from those experiences.

Bio:
Stefan Savage is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington and a B.S. in Applied History from Carnegie Mellon University. He currently serves as the co-director for UCSD's Center for Network Systems (CNS). Savage is known for his work on network security and reliability, on cybercrime economics and defense, and on the empirical measurement of cybersecurity and cyberinfrastructure. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a MacArthur Fellow, an ACM Fellow, and is the recipient of ACM's Prize in Computing and AAAS' Golden Goose award. He currently holds the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Chair in Information and Computer Science, but is a fairly down-to-earth guy and only writes about himself in the third person when asked.