Research Elevator Pitch Activity

Overview

In this activity, you’ll be learning about some of the latest academic/industrial research in cybersecurity from USENIX. The USENIX conference is a unique organization that accepts cybersecurity research from all over, usually with a more practical and applied angle than most security conferences.

They are also very open about their research, so accessing videos of presentations and original prints of the papers is much easier than other organizations.

Just Google “Usenix 2023” or whatever year you’re doing this in. If you’re a spring semester, the previous year is probably already in the past.

Round 1: What Would a 331 Student Find Interesting? Titles only.

For the first 5-10 minutes, we want to find papers that you think your classmates will find interesting.

  1. As is the time-honored tradition of the SE department, come up with a name your group!
  2. Go to our class-wide shared GoogleDoc for this activity. You will need to be logged into RIT, but you’ll be able to edit.
  3. Find the list of accepted papers on the website.
  4. Your instructor will divide up the list of papers by group so you’re not all looking at the same material at the same time.
  5. From just looking at titles, copy and paste the title of a paper that you think a 331 student will find interesting.

Round 2: Abstracts only.

  1. Rotate. The instructor will rotate paper assignments.
  2. You now have ~10 minutes to find the most interesting paper by only looking at the abstracts.
  3. As a team, pick the one most interesting abstract.

Round 3: Elevator Pitches

  1. Rotate again, as assigned by your instructor.
  2. As a team, open up the paper that you were assigned and review it for ~10 minutes.
  3. Be ready to give a less than 1-minute description of the paper!
  4. The class will vote on the most interesting one!