My take on internships, summer schools, and exchanges

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Earlier this year, I was interviewed about traveling opportunities for doctoral students, and experiences gained pursuing various internships, summer schools, and exchanges as a visiting scholar.

Some of the points I emphasized are that traveling broadens your horizons and that when well-planned can help you along in your academic journey. For instance, you may come to learn a new perspective on your research that you may have not considered or explored before, and as well learn about potential pitfalls. Another thing is that you might meet people who have strong academic networks. These people may help you widen your academic network and may play a role in your future endeavors.

You can access the full article by clicking here. If you are a student, or maybe a prospective one, I highly encourage you to seize traveling opportunities related to your studies.

Also, feel free to drop me a message if you want to know more about my experiences.

Using Mindmaps to Organize My Writing

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Especially, when working with a long manuscript but as well when you want to organize concepts and brainstorm ideas, mind maps offer a great visual tool for helping in that.

You can draw mind maps by hand but personally, I prefer to use software tools for this. A tool that I find particularly effective is XMind. I have used the free version of this software to layout the structure of my thesis. Once you know the shortcuts keys you can layout a structure in minutes and then refine it accordingly.

Take a look at the main structure of my licentiate hereunder and an expansion of it in the second diagram.

Screen Shot 2020-04-10 at 16.06.00

Mind map showing the main structure of my licentiate thesis.

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Expanding the nodes of the mind map to show some of the concepts I have used for Part 1 and Part 2 of my thesis.

At the moment, I am also working on an idea for my journal article, and have already created a structure for that as a mind map. After I get the structure ready and approved by my coauthors, I can start working on the actual text. I would already know how the pieces would connect together in a cohesive structure and flow well if I follow the mind map in my writing.

Certainly, if you need help on how to create mind maps for your manuscript, course, talk, or for whatever reason you may have, feel free to get in touch.

Interesting Book Showed Up In My Mailbox

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Today, I am happy to have received a hardcopy of the book – Privacy and Identity Management. Data for Better Living: AI and Privacy. There is a chapter in this book, which I have authored together with my academic advisor titled: “On the Design of a Privacy-Centered Data Lifecycle for Smart Living Spaces.” In that article, I have identified how the software development process can be enhanced to manage privacy threats, amongst other things.

Privacy and Identity Management

Hardcopy of the book “Privacy and Identity Management. Data for Better Living: AI and Privacy”

All the articles included in the book are certainly worth a read covering various aspects of privacy ranging from a technical, compliance, and law perspective.

Investigating Privacy Threats in Smart Homes

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On Tuesday, I gave a presentation at PerCom 2020. This was the first time, the conference was held completely online (due to the global pandemic of COVID-19), and speakers were asked to deliver their presentations remotely over Zoom.

In my case, I gave two live presentations in the Work In Progress (WiP) session being chaired by Diane Cook.  During this time, I discussed how smart connected homes can be formally modeled so that privacy threats can be systematically identified and analyzed.  Take a look at my short teaser clip below.

In case you are interested in the accompanying poster for my presentation, you can access it either from my Presentations menu tab or otherwise by clicking here.  Also, I have uploaded the slides for the video which you can access here.

As always, please feel free to contact me in case you want to know more about this paper, and about security and privacy in general. Finally, I want to remind and encourage you to submit to PerCom or its workshops. You can get some high-quality feedback on your work that can help you improve it and more.

The Current State of IoT Security and a Glimpse Into The Future

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On Tuesday 10th March, I  was invited to give a guest lecture about IoT security in Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (BTH) in Karlskrona, Sweden. Karlskrona is approximately 3 hours away from Malmö.

During my lecture, I gave realistic examples of attacks that targeted IoT systems. For instance, attacks targeting consumer drones, electric cars, and IP cameras. I also discussed the technical, procedural, and human challenges involved in securing IoT and some safeguards.

Blekinge Tekniska Högskola.

In the future, I will work to automate IoT security.  Similar to smart devices acting autonomously to perceive and act on their environment, IoT security should evolve towards greater autonomy in detecting threats and reacting to attacks. This evolution relates to the autoimmunity of smart devices allowing for the prevention and containment of attacks in hostile environments.

You can access a condensed version of my lecture here.

 

Presenting my research project at LTH

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On 4 March 2020, I had the opportunity to present my PhD research project at Lund University.  My presentation titled “Security and privacy in smart connected homes” was held in front of a mixed audience, consisting of key industry professionals and well-established academics.  Many interesting questions were raised after each presentation. Two questions directed to me were about updates concerning attacks targeting smart speaker systems, and another one whether secure regions within the home area network can be configured to have parts of the home or the entire home offline.

The workshop opening slide by Prof. Per Runeson.

Moving on to the discussion part of the workshop there were different takeaways. One of the main ones was the difficulty of instilling security awareness, especially to the general consumer when purchasing and using IoT products. One can have a lot of security features embedded in his product but if the customer is not aware of those or does not know how to enable them then that is a challenge. Another key point that was shared across multiple presentations and raised as a discussion item,  was the huge spike of vulnerabilities being reported, especially during the past 3 years.  Here, it is interesting to investigate what is actually being targeted and the causes of that.  Perhaps, this is not only related to the digitization of ‘everything’ but as well to the constant reuse of software code, including the heavy reliance on software frameworks (including some operating systems that may have not been properly audited).  Organizations should remember that in addition to the tangible benefits you gain from building your software from reusable modular and perhaps opensource components you automatically inherit security vulnerabilities and risks.

My presentation at LTH.

I highly encourage you to attend this quarterly workshop especially if you are into software engineering but even if you are not. Certainly, you can learn about what’s happening from the research side but as well from industry professionals. Besides, it is a good opportunity to network and share ideas with other likeminded people!

Check the workshop agenda: https://www.lth.se/digitalth/events/?event=softwarelth-workshop-internet-of-things-and-security

Strengthen your academic writing skills with this resource

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If you are planning on writing a scholarly publication, maybe it is your first research article, you want to make sure that you use the appropriate jargon for that. This is especially if you are a non-native speaker of English. A truly good resource that can help in that is the Academic Phrasebank maintained by The University of Manchester.

This resource provides numerous examples of phraseological “nuts and bolts” for writing organized according to the main sections of a research paper or dissertation. The phrases in this resource have been extracted from authentic academic sources including postgraduate dissertations and phrases from academic articles drawn from a broad spectrum of disciplines.

Consider consulting it for your next manuscript.

Featured on LinkedIn and Facebook

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I am truly surprised and grateful that a photo of myself and my colleague is being featured on the university website and shared among social media, in particular, on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Talking science featuring Dr. Arezoo Sarkheyli-Hägele and myself

Talking science featuring Dr. Arezoo Sarkheyli-Hägele and myself (post adopted from LinkedIn).

In case you are interested what the text above means, see its translation below:

“Good teachers don’t grow on trees. They grow when they have the opportunity for skills development. As one of the country’s largest teacher training courses, we are involved in shaping the school of the future. The development of employees is a common responsibility that we share with the entire school community.

We offer you who work in the school a wide range of skills-developing training at half-speed, full time and evening. So we contribute to your skills development and to the school being able to both retain its dedicated employees and recruit new ones.”

But, the most important part is that if you want to know more about what Malmö university offers in terms of courses and programs take a look at  mau.se/gemensamtansvar

2020 academic semester kickoff

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Today, was the kick-off to the new academic (Spring) semester.  I took the opportunity to present an overview of what is expected to be covered in the Information Security course. During this lecture, I also motivated students why it is important to study information security, introduced the course syllabus, and talked about the learning outcomes of the course.

This year, I have about 150 students taking my course. This is a great achievement especially considering that the course is an elective course. Talking to such large groups is always exciting and fun! You can see me below testing the microphone and preparing my laptop before the students start heading to the class.  All the lectures are delivered in a classroom setting but all the material including slides, supplementary material, and any assignments are uploaded on the course portal.

Getting ready at Malmö university (2020)

In addition to inviting two external academics as guests, this year, I invited two speakers from the industry. The speakers have many years of experience working with real-life security use cases and are working with international companies TrueSec and Fingerprints.

Learning Swedish is beneficial

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If you are a foreigner living in Sweden you will be perfectly fine and survive well without knowing any Swedish. From my experience, the majority of people have an excellent command of the English language both spoken and written. Also, with tools such as “Google Translate” you can go a long way.

Nonetheless, I personally feel that if you want to better interact with the locals then learning Swedish is certainly of good help. You can try to learn Swedish from textbooks (e.g., Rivstart A1+A2), digital apps (e.g., Duolingo), or a combination, but in my opinion, attending a classroom is suggested. This is especially if you are new to the language and to the country. The other resources can come in handy later or as supplemental material.

In the fall of 2019, I was given the opportunity to attend a Swedish course organized by Malmö university. It was a great course, highly interactive and current. Putting some hard work and clocking some hours working on the essays, I managed to complete the course with success.

Swedish language certificate

Swedish language certificate

My suggestion if you have relocated to a country whether it is on a temporary basis or for a longer-term, I do recommend you take the challenge and learn the language of the country. This will not only improve your resume but will also help you win more friends and integrate better with the locals.