Evaluating the Effectiveness of Adversarial Attacks against Botnet Detectors
Conference 18th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications
Cambridge, MA, USA
Oneliner: After not even two months, I am back to Boston...
I came back from my time at Dartmouth on August 4th, and on September 25th I had to take another flight to Boston. Although I was not as stressed as I was the year before (i.e., NCA18 was my first presentation!), this time I had another source of stress.
Prof. Mirco Marchetti – the appointed Financial Chair – had limited time to do much due to… his wife giving birth! And since we were both members of the WEBLab, it was only natural that I – the Ph.D Candidate! – helped him in handling some of his “financial duties” (I had no complaints BTW: he spent a lot of time to “tutor” me during my PhD).
What are these financial duties, you may ask? If I had to say a word, I would choose “things”. Think about any conference with some reputation. Now, think about the “things” that are given to you once you arrive at the venue. The bag which contains some leaflets of the program, as well as the USB stick (with an engraving!) containing the proceedings; moreover, the fancier conferences also have pens and block-notes (both with the conference logo). And, of course, the attendee’s badge, with its plastic cover.
Well, all those “things” written in italics in the paragraph above… I had to take care of. This means: (i) finding a company that would make them, (ii) ensure that they would ship it to the appointed location and that they would arrive in time, and (iii) do a lot of manual labor to set everything up. You should have seen my face when, 4 days before the start of the conference, I still had no confirmation that the USB sticks had been shipped (from Italy!)…
Takeaway: whenever you are given a plastic badge with your name, spare a thought for the poor guy/girl who manually put that card inside the plastic cover. Also, I now understand why some conference organizers are reluctant to go back to the “physical” conferences: remote ones do not require all such extra effort…