work

My first semester at Stevens if over!! I didn't have to teach, though, so it was a pretty chill semester to get through. I'm looking forward to taking time off, seeing family, and coming back fresh the next. I took the past couple days off and don't plan to work again until after Christmas.

This week though, despite most academia slowing down, I had a pretty busy week. It started out with an Aspiring NSF PI workshop in Washington, DC, where I got to meet a number of security researchers, including a handful of cryptographers! It was nice to hear about other's interest and learn so much about the NSF grant application process (which I really needed). I was able to see a lot of mini-examples of proposals and get feedback on one of my own ideas. I hope I get the chance to flesh it out and turn it into a full SaTC proposal in the future.

We also finally got back the reviews for our Eurocrypt paper that got rejected :(. Honestly, the reviewers were pretty fair and gave some good feedback. I think we'll be able to make our paper a lot stronger and resubmit it without too much effort. Good luck to the rest of the paper still in the running!

Other than that, I had a few meetings and made some minor progress on research.

non-work

I started my break a little early, about halfway through Thursday. (The same day my partner flew in to visit Hoboken!) The last couple of days we've taken as pretty chill. We got lunch with a friend in midtown and did a bit of Christmas shopping to round out our presents. But for the most part, we took the chance to relax at home. We cooked some, got some local food, ran, play some It Takes Two, and wrapped presents. Before that, most of my time was taken with wrapping up a bit of work before break and commuting to and from DC.

questions

• What's an appropriate scope for an NSF SaTC award?
  • I feel like I'm still used to thinking on the 1-2 paper timeline.

Thanks for reading to the end! Here are some pictures from this week.