I think that the process of compiling, constructing, understanding the SDGs is inherently political and conflictual. And that means that it is very selective in terms of the information that is going to be analysed and processed, but also selective in terms of even the identification of the goals themselves. So I think the IRF is going to constitute a very important independent space where contested and contestable ideas and information and knowledge can actually be presented and packaged for the decision making process. I mean what is powerful for me about the IRF is it's so unique bringing together independent research institutes from all over the world, from the north and from the south. And so really I think it's able to bring those voices from the Caribbean, from Africa, from Asia into the global dialogue. And let us really be learning from each other so that what's put forward really represents a global perspective. The collective of the independent research forum has got at one end policy institutions that work at the New York negotiations end. At the other end there are institutions that are doing practical work on the ground and in between there are research organisations. Now these dozen odd organisations can actually influence policy processes both among governments at New York and also ultimately when it comes to implementation can influence the implementation process. We are an independent forum but we are strongly committed with the changement. We put our research to the decision makers and to work together the scientists, the decision makers, the stakeholders, the United Nations system and we think that as an independent forum we can support that and to help to this commitment. It's an independent research forum. We are very pleased to be part of the process and we are a group. We work together, we look at the key issues and we do our research, we provide our policy input. I think that we can work together to contribute the process to make a better future. Through the network of the IRF we have collected 12 research institutes around the world and we cover such a wide range of disciplines and agendas really from the social and democracy to environmental issues to economic growth agendas and collectively we can provide a really balanced and comprehensive arena or forum as we call it for knowledge exchange and learning across these issues because it is the totality of these issues that should be the foundation for the post 2015 development agenda and the sustainable development goals. I think the IRF can bring to the post 2015 process an independent perspective on the key issues that isn't biased by any particular agendas but has a common vision of what we're looking for. I think we bring together a really diverse mix of both ground level practitioners and research institutes and think tanks who have a really broad based perspective on the process and can contribute our shared knowledge. I think what we can contribute to is among other things as have already been mentioned is to identify some of the more contentious issues and try to suggest ways in which those can be constructively approached and perhaps overcome.


In audio the importance of the power supply quality can be underestimated. In those cases an external power supply is used, upgrading it to an audiophile version can have a big impact on the sound quality, as we will see in this review. Ferrum is a new company, sort of. It is founded by HEM, which is a more than 20 year old Polish company that collaborated with MiTech Digital. They co-designed and manufactured the MiTech products and also handle distribution in European and Far East countries. If I understand it well, this cooperation has come to a halt and HEM started up Ferrum to issue audio equipment under their own brand. The first product being the Hipsus, a rather special approach to a power supply. The Hipsus power supply can be used to power any audio device that needs up to 6A of DC voltage between 5 and 30 volts DC, which is about any audio device save power amplifiers. It does need to have a DC power input of course. I will review the Hipsus powering the MiTech Brooklyn Digital to analog converter since I have some experience using several power supplies on the Brooklyn. By the way, that goes for the Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Plus and the Brooklyn Bridge. I started to use the Brooklyn on its own built-in power supply about 5 years ago. After a while I hooked up the SBooster BOTW PMP Eco power supply, which improved the sound quality to a degree. A bigger improvement came 2 years ago with the €850 syntax extreme performance linear power supply that was later on internally upgraded to the improved €1200 iCon version. This is now compared to the €1000 Ferrum Hipsus to be used in my reference setup 1. See my video about my reference setups November 2020 for details. The Hipsus has a metal housing and front that with 218mm is as wide as the Brooklyn and at 207mm is only 1mm deeper. But at 58mm it is 14mm taller. It weighs 2.9 kilos. On the front we see a rotary encoder that is used for settings and adjustments, on which later on more. The color display shows the nominal output voltage, the actual output voltage, the power output in watts and the output current in amperes. The display on this photo differs slightly from the current model in that it shows the input voltage instead of the nominal output voltage. On the left the FE logo that is lit on operation and will dim in standby. On the rear we see the IEC mains input, the fuse holder and the power switch in one unit that internally also contains a two stage mains filter. The micro usb is for updating the power supply using a Windows 10 computer. No support for macOS or Linux. The trigger connector can be set as input or output so the Hipsus can be switched on by another device or can switch on another device. The power output is a locking four-pole connector. A matching cable comes with the unit. You can choose between a 5x2.5mm or 5x2.1mm DC plug. An extra cable will set you back 99 euros. Inside we see a two stage filter that is integrated with the mains panel on the rear. From there the AC voltage goes to the circuit on the right of it. That measures the transformer output voltage to switch between 230 and 115 volts AC by switching the primary windings in parallel or in series. The transformer outputs 34.85 volts AC over the two white wires. What exactly happens on the main board is not fully clear to me. I see an ARM microprocessor, four times 4700 microfarad capacitors and a set of two Scottke barrier rectifiers that are known for being fast and able to deliver large currents. Another thing to notice is the four wires leading to the output connector. Two of them sense the voltage near the device it powers to compensate for losses in the cable. For as far as I understand, the transformer output passes to a heavily filtered low ripple switching mode power supply. This is followed up by a low dropout regulator, so it is a cascade of switch mode and linear power supply. It is claimed that this way it offers the best of both systems. Fast transient response, high efficiency, low ripple and low noise. On ordering you have to check what DC power plug your device needs. That can be seen on a long list of devices, currently 180 devices long. Since it is hard to find, I have put a link in the show notes. After switching on for the first time you are asked to select your device from the same list of devices on the display. The Hipsos is then automatically set up. If your device is not on the list, you can set the voltage and polarity manually. Actually, apart from power amplifiers there will be few devices the Hipsos cannot power. Even an Intel NUC10i7 is powered with ease. An audio service like those from ELAC, INUOS, Melco and the Rune Nuculus. Headphone amps, pre-amps, phono pre-amps, DACs, audio processors and so on can all be powered from the Hipsos, as long as they require a DC voltage between 5 and 30 volts and no more than 80 watts. Once the Hipsos is set up, you can fine tune the voltage for optimum sound. Depending on the device powered, this can have a clear effect on the sound quality. Then there are many other settings to customize it by your taste. The brightness of the EV logo during operation and standby, the display brightness, display auto-off and auto-return to the main screen. Furthermore, the trigger connection on the rear can be set to wake up the Hipsos when a trigger signal is received from another device or the Hipsos can trigger another device to wake up. You can even pair an Apple remote control to scroll the menu at a distance. Through updates, the in-device list of devices is updated from time to time. As said, I judged the Hipsos using the MiTech Brooklyn. It has its own internal switch mode power supply. To use it you connect the mains power cable to the IEC power inlet. Alternatively you can connect an external power supply to the DC input here and leave the IEC mains inlet unused. As I told you in the beginning of this video, I initially used an sBooster power supply that was followed up by the syntax that gave an impressive improvement in sound quality. Now I had to judge whether the Hipsos perform better or worse and I can be quite clear about it. It scores higher on all points. But since Ferrum has an integrated possibility to vary the output voltage of the Hipsos within a safe range and since the Ferrum designers know the Brooklyn inside out, I varied the voltage to notice that a lower voltage leads to a less inspired sound lacking power and speed. Increasing the voltage does the opposite. It makes the sound more alert, faster and better focused. It also further improves low end resolution. Increasing the voltage further, you go to a point where stress starts to add. After Apple listening, I finally settled for 13.1 volts. It then outperforms the syntax in every aspect. More spatial information, better focus, deeper lows with more texture, cleaner mid-range and highs. It's just one notch up from using the syntax. The Ferrum Hipsos is an ingenious piece of work. It is suited for about any audio device safe power amplifiers. It's easy to set up and lets you tweak the voltage settings within a for that device safe region. And it delivers the power whiter than white, so to speak. When in the future you change gear, you can use it again as well as with other power supplies you have to hope the new gear runs at the same voltage. From what I heard from people around me, it seems to work great on other gear too, even on network switches. Which makes sense, for 6 amps of clean power is 6 amps of clean power and that will make any audio device perform at its best. In combination with the Brooklyn family, you maintain the unique Brooklyn properties, like being a preamp, a phono preamp and an MQA DAC. But it brings it to a clear higher level sound wise. In that light, the 995 Euros for the Hipsos is a very sound investment. Which brings me to the end of this video, but no, there will be a new video next Friday at 5pm central European time. If you don't want to miss that, subscribe to this channel or follow me on the social media, so you will be informed when new videos are out. Help me reach even more people by giving this video a thumb up or mentioning it on the social media. It's much appreciated. Many thanks to those viewers that support this channel financially, it keeps me independent and lets me improve the channel further. If that makes you feel like supporting my work too, the links are in the comments below this video on YouTube. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHBproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.


I have been telling you guys that it's my responsibility to change the narratives of Africa and also it's my responsibility to let Africans know that Africa belongs to them. Do you think that Africans should grab Africa like where they grab their woman? Of course! Of course! Africans should grab Africa the way they grab their woman. You know your story is really inspiring. Thank you. And I think all Kenyans know you to be what? Alex Moakideu. What do you do? Radio personality. And how long have you been on radio? Sixteen years. Sixteen years? Sixteen years. Incredible. I'm telling you. Were you born in Nairobi? No, I was not born in Nairobi, I was born in Mombasa. Born and raised in Mombasa? Yes. And what happened to you? You left Kenya already? Or you lived all your life in Kenya? No, no, no. I've been to different places. Worked in Doche Valley in Germany for some time. There's a team also from the UK. We used to do international reporting for sporting events like the Olympics in Beijing, which I covered for radio stations around East Africa that broadcast in Swahili. So I also went to Melbourne to broadcast also. I also went to the world games for the stations around East Africa that broadcast in Swahili because I'm a Swahili broadcaster.  Swahili international. How long did you live in Germany? Six months only. Six months only and I was done.  They offered me an opportunity to stay some more, but I said, let me go back to Kenya. You left Germany after six months to come back to Kenya? Yes. Why? Why because I think Kenya is beautiful. You know, because of the people, because it's my home, you know. And there's so many opportunities in Kenya for you to grab and move on and make more money in Kenya than I used to make in Germany. You mean you make more money in Kenya than in Germany? Definitely. It is like almost 500% more than what I used to make in Germany. So much more. I can't even think twice about it. If you call me today and tell me go to Germany and work in the Chevelle, I'll tell you no. Straight on. Hell no. What took you to radio? Radio was like a miracle, I think. I would say that because I was an actor. I used to act in school. Then I used to act professionally around Nairobi, Mombasa. I've been actually into so many stages doing solo verses, plays and stuff. So we used to have a group called Horo Horo Thespians in Mombasa. So there was this time when a client wanted a radio script. That would be like radio drama. So I came in with my few of my colleagues from the industry and we did a script like 30 minutes only. We written the script, voiced the script and it was so nice. The client said, these are the guys. These are the guys. This is exactly what I wanted. So I want them to continue doing my scripts throughout. So that's how I just got into radio, into doing commercial scripts. And there was this one news editor, Peter Musenbi. He's now in BBC London. He was our news editor at Baraka FM in Mombasa. He told me, hey, you have a voice for radio and you can actually read news. I was like, oh really? Yeah. So he told me to start practicing poli poli. And I started practicing listening to other media houses, BBC, Swahili broadcasting media houses. You know, I started practicing this one time. The president came to Mombasa to open Mombasa show ground. So there was a lot of traffic. Our news anchor was actually reporting the story. And I was alone in the studio. Musenbi told me, hey, this is your chance. This is your chance.   I was like, really? Are you for sure? And he gave me the scripts. You go through the scripts because this guy cannot make it. He won't be here by one. We must have a bulletin at 1 pm. So I said, OK, fine. And I went on air and I did my thing. Coming out of the studio, it was so nice by the way. Though of course I panicked here and there, but it was so nice. When I came out of the studio, all of them were listening to radio. It was so loud and they were clapping and they told me you would dance so well. You should be our news anchor. You should be the news at 2 pm and 3 pm and 4 pm and the rest of the afternoon. And that's why he said being a radio presenter is a miracle. It's a miracle. It's a miracle to be here. I'm so glad that you left Germany after six months. You came back here to discover what you actually want to do on the continent. Brother, like, I'm not going to say you've made it, but I mean you are getting there. Because there are so many Africans that tell me we cannot make it in Africa. We have to go abroad and get money before we come back. But you are making everything in here. What did you do to support the whole radio business? What did you do to support it? I went out there to learn. We took a plus international now. The guys in the UK, I learnt a lot from them. While in Germany I learnt a lot about our feature stories, about broadcasting interviews and stuff. When I came back, I came back with so much content which really helped me. Even helping other people who are growing up in Mombasa, in the industry, Baraka FM. When I came to Nairobi, of course, all that knowledge. Because I came to Nairobi to start up a new station. That is Radio Maesha. Own station. Not mine, not mine. I'm not there yet. But go willing, I should be there. Very soon I should be there. So when we came back we were called because these media houses, the standard media group, people who are good, who can come up and start their station. Their first radio station. Because it was a newspaper and TV only. So they wanted radio. They are like 100 years now. One of the oldest media houses in Kenya. So we came in and because of knowledge, we really helped bring up that radio station. Right now, by the time I was living, that radio station was at number one. In the whole country. It was at number one. That was in 2018. 2018? Yes, it was at number one. Then I joined Mielele FM. Yeah, joined Mielele FM. Because mine is to really, you know, go to other radio stations. And you know, help other, impact everywhere, you know. Meet other people, we exchange ideas and you know, become better radio presenters. You know where we are? We are at Cowash. Pumphead ride Cowash. Is it for you or you work with someone? It's mine. It's mine, yeah. Why? Are you interested in the radio? I'm still interested in the radio.  Radio is a lifestyle to me. It's a lifestyle. I will do it until I get very old. Yeah, so this one came up because I love cars so much. I love doing things I love. Yeah, in Africa, in Kenya. And I like telling people, do the things you like to do.  This is your place. This is your area. You can explore, you can do whatever you want to do. So create opportunities for yourselves. So me, I love cars so much. So I started importing cars from Japan to Kenya to sell online. And actually it was like a miracle again.  Because I didn't want to sell them at a very high price. No, I wanted to sell. Just get something small. So I got a lot of clients. I sold almost eight cars very fast. I was like, oh, wow. Then later on, I have a friend of mine who has a shining sparkle. That is a car wash. I used to wash my car there. And he's a very good friend of mine. It's called Steve Nyabwa. So Steve told me, you can start yours too. So Steve took me through almost every, you know, and this is what we are supposed to do as Africans, as Kenyans, you know. When somebody wants to start something, you hold their hands, you take them to that place. So Steve actually worked with me until the first Pampard Rise car wash came up, which is not this one actually. This is only two months. This is one that I started in April. It's in Nathriva. So until it came up, and I was so happy about it, and even the money I used to, I mean, I'm getting there. So when this opportunity came up, I said, ah, why not? Let me start another one. So this is only two months. So this is only two months. Two months, yeah. Two of this car wash. Two of this car wash. That's why this year. Is it worth it to invest in car wash? It is. It is definitely. I wanted to say something that I know nobody has ever asked you. Yeah. Are you sure? Okay. Yeah.  Here? Yeah. What am I? What am I? You know, like... All right. There's this ideology about Africans knowing that, hey, I want to school. I want to be a doctor. Yeah. An engineer. I want to look for a white-collar job. Yeah. Something that is respectable. Yeah. But... I will tell you something. Okay? As a radio presenter right now, I'm being paid a lot of money. A lot of money as a radio presenter because I also bring a lot of money for the show. Yeah. So they have to pay me. Good money. Okay? Good money. And it's not a job. So at the moment, I'm only two months here. But I'm almost heading there. This by the time in June next year, it will double what I earn as a radio presenter. So tell us... Projections. Are there opportunities in Africa for Africans? Of course. A lot of them. So why are we not seeing them? There are a lot of them. I'm doing this, but this is not just purely cowish. Because guys in Kitingela, the entire Kitingela, every person is just washing cars. But I'm saying, right here, I'm doing buffing. I'm doing interior wash. I'm doing steam engine cleaning. I'm doing rim cleaning. I'm doing headlight restoration. Because nobody else is doing that. So you have to look at the car and say, okay, what do I want to do? Do I want to put music system? Do I want to clean the cars? Do I want to... So that you don't... We don't wash cars, all of us. That's the only problem. But the opportunities are many, many in Kenya. We have so many young Africans watching us right now. If you should advise young Africans watching us, what are you going to say? Number one, what do you like? What do you like? Because you have to... There must be something that drives you. What do you love? What is your passion? That which is your passion tries so much and make money from that which you like. This guy here, this guy here, what am I? He's making money. He's making money. I'm travelling all over Africa. He's travelling all over Africa. Making money and shooting videos and being happy. That's all. And that is a good vibe. And that is what we're talking about. What do you like? I love cars. That's why I'm doing this. I love radio. That's why I'm doing radio. I'm inspired. Thanks, bro. Really inspired. I want to say thank you so much for talking to me. But one more thing, we've got Africans who are always going to want to cross the borders. I mean want to leave the shores of Africa. Some of them even use the bad way to get to wherever they want to go to. If you should talk to such Africans, what will you say? There is what you want out there and there is what we have in here. Okay? So the only thing we need is to make it in life. All of us want to make it in life. And you can make it in life here. I was in Germany for six months. They offered me two more years contract. And then another three years after that one, I said no. I want to come back home. Why? Because it's money at home. And I've done well actually as a radio presenter. And I'm also trying this business which is doing pretty well. And I've seen so many other Africans here in Kenya who are doing pretty well. They will never go anywhere. So this is where you are. This is your home. Our motherland has everything you need. It is up to you to reach out and say okay, let me go this direction or that direction. And then let's make Africa beautiful. I want to say thank you so much for talking to me. Karibu bro. Karibu bro.


Good morning, I'm Suzy Thompson and I'm the potato breeder here at North Dakota State University. I'm really sorry that we're unable to do field days in person this year, but I'm instead hoping that with the use of technology we'll still be able to share our valuable information. So the potato breeding program was initiated in 1930 here at North Dakota State University and in that time NDSU has released 26 potato varieties and several others in collaboration with other breeding programs around North America. North Dakota ranks about 4th. At times we go up and we also fall down in the ranking in terms of U.S. potato production, but the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota produce a tremendous amount of processing potatoes. About 60% of our potato production is for frozen french fries. We also produce chipping potatoes for making into potato chips, one of America's favorite snacks, and the Red River Valley itself is really quite famous for the beautiful red skinned cultivars for the fresh market. And so our breeding program is lucky, I feel. We are able to work on and develop varieties that fit all of those market types. In terms of market types, some of the quality characteristics that are important would be, for example, for our dual purpose russets, we want long potatoes that are blocky in shape so that they can make a large number of french fries per tuber. We also want them to have what we term high specific gravity, so they have high dry matter content in the frying process. The water in potato tubers is displaced by the oil, and so if you have high dry matter potatoes, then the amount of oil that is taken up is less, leading to a lower calorie product, but also the oil tends to be the highest cost ingredient of either chips or french fry varieties. We also want them to be low in sugar because then they process into nice white or very light golden fried products. For our fresh market varieties, like you can say way down on the end, many of those of course are red skinned with white fleshed, but we're starting to see an increase in interest here in the U.S. Yellow flesh is typical in other parts of the globe, particularly in Europe, so we're starting to see more interest in development of red skin varieties that have yellow flesh. A lot of them tend to taste good, but we as consumers of horticultural products we tend to shop with our eyes, so we're looking for that beautiful round shape, bright red skin color, and most of our fresh market varieties will have a lower specific gravity, so they're a little bit more waxy or creamy in texture, so that our potatoes hold together when we're making boiled potatoes or American fries in our fry pans. So that gives us a little bit of background in terms of our market types and some attributes that are important for each. In terms of locations, the NDSU Potato Breeding Program does a tremendous amount of research in the greenhouses here on campus, but we also have research trials spread across North Dakota and Western Minnesota. In North Dakota we have research trials at Crystal, Hoople, Laramore, Inkster, and at Oaks. On the Minnesota side we have research trials at Park Rapids, and as part of the breeding program also have to operate a certified seed potato operation, so our seed maintenance and increases as well as our seedling nursery are just to the southeast of Fargo-Moorhead here at Baker, Minnesota. In terms of the Oaks area, and the potatoes that we can see here are from the two trials that I have at Oaks. One would be our dual-purpose russet trial, and the other would be a fresh market trial. There will be a handout that will hopefully be available posted both at the website for the Oaks station field day as well as I will try to get it on the Potato Breeding website, which is accessible through the Plant Science Department's website. The growers in the Oaks area predominantly produce processing or dual-purpose russets for the processing into French fries or packing for the fresh market, things like baked potatoes for restaurants or industrial use, but also potatoes that could be baked in our grocery stores. And then of course we have the beautiful reds and Yukon Gold as a check for our yellow flesh down on the far end. Potato Breeding is really a team effort, and in order for a successful release, the Potato Breeding project itself cannot develop a cultivar on its own. We need a myriad of players, including our Extension Potato Specialist, Dr. Andy Robinson. I work closely with plant pathologists, Dr. Julie Pashie and Dr. Gary Secor, weed scientists, such as Dr. Harleen Haderman-Valente. And we're starting to do some work with Dr. Paulo Flores, who is in Ag Systems Bioengineering and looking at different means of doing high throughput phenotyping. So the trial that you see in the background here is a trial in collaboration with Dr. Haderman-Valente and Dr. Flores, as well as our grad student and a postdoc, where we are looking at herbicide sensitivity on a number of advancing selections, but also named cultivars, and seeing if we can't use new technologies such as drones in order to facilitate more rapid phenotyping of the germplasm in order to develop what we term cultivar specific management profiles for our new releases. Products are another important key feature of our research team, but really the ultimate user of our products are our producers, as well as our potato industry, so that might include processors, packers, and finally, we consumers of potatoes. We'll kind of venture down the line here real rapidly, and I might point out a couple of interesting parents. As I was driving into work this morning, there was a discussion on the radio station that I was listening to about how many lines a company had out in the field that they were evaluating and how many of those might become a new variety release. In the case of potato, about one in one million seedlings becomes a released or a named cultivar. So it's a big numbers game, but a lot of fun if you enjoy being outside and doing some hard work. Some of the clones that you'll see here, this one for example, Russet norcota, the female parent was a NDSU release back in the 1980s. It's extremely typey. This particular progeny looks very similar to that Russet norcota. Russet norcota is not able to be processed. It has too high of sugars and too low of specific gravity, so I crossed it with a line from the USDA program at Madison, Wisconsin, hoping that the progeny would become more dual purpose and be able to be made both into French fries but still have that beautiful appearance like a norcota. So as I mentioned, this one is a cross between Dakota Russet and Dakota Trailblazer. It is gradually working its way through the evaluation process with some of the processing companies with the hopes that it will be released in the near future also with dual purpose processing qualities. We have some interesting lines. For example, this male parent here, Q115-6, is a clone that has Colorado potato beetle resistance and it offers glandular trichomes, which are a type of hair on the potato leaves that the beetles don't really care for because when they break off those hairs, there is a little glob of exudate at the base of that hair and it causes their little tarsie, their feet, to get caught up in almost tar lake substance and they can't move and it also gums up their mandibles, so resulting in beetle resistance. So that one is moving along. Thought that I would just mention our Dakota Russet and I have to say that this year the russeting at Oaks is light. It's early in the season, but this particular area has received a tremendous amount of rainfall in 2020 and so it appears that our russeting for a lot of our varieties is going to be light, but Dakota Russet was one of our most recent releases and it is progressing through the evaluation process and has already been approved by multiple fast food or quick serve restaurants for use in frozen products, primarily french fries. In terms of our reds, you can see that we have some really beautiful skin color. The most recent red fresh market release is our Dakota Ruby and you can see it here. Many of the clones included in this year's trial have Dakota Ruby as one parent and you can see that the beautiful bright red skin color, the high tuber set and the uniformity of size really carries over. There are some kind of interesting varieties that we use as parents. This romance is a European proprietary variety, but we're able to use it as a parent and it has long tuber type with yellow flesh, but it has a myriad of resistances to things like potato virus Y and so you can see here we have two siblings and the difference between the two is quite remarkable. The dash 3R has that beautiful type-y round. Looks like you should be boiling those up right now whereas it's sibling, the dash 10RY has yellow flesh but also has a much paler skin color. As I mentioned with horticultural products we tend to shop with our eyes so more consumers would be interested in the bright red skinned ones versus the industry standards like red lasota and red norlin down at the far end. Thank you all very much for attending the Virtual Oaks Field Day. I hope that you have had an opportunity to learn a little bit about potato and I hope that you will also remember that potatoes are really little powerhouses from a nutritional standpoint and that you will consume them as part of a healthy diet.


Welcome back. I am continuing onward with audio for VR. So, we introduced that last lecture. I talked about the human hearing system and gave you some of the basic biology of how our hearing works. I also talked about propagation of sound waves and made some comparisons to light and vision along the way. We talked about auditory localization and I finished up with that. I talked about monoral cues and binaural cues and now I want to talk about the rendering part. So, you have sound sound rendering just like we had rendering for the visual part which we call computer graphics there is an audio part that has many similarities to the visual part. So, I will describe four steps and just give some comments about this as I go along and it will be significantly more brief than it was for the visual case. So, four steps. So, one we have modeling. So, for the visual case and even before we covered vision versus audio or anything we talked about geometric models right. So, we will again have geometric models and have stationary or movable models. You could have movable models you could have a moving object that generates sound or maybe sound will be bouncing off of a moving object. So, walls, obstacles, moving bodies perhaps you have a bird that is flying in VR and generating sounds. When we were modeling objects for computer graphics for rendering in that case we were concerned about the material properties in some cases right. We wanted to know how the light reflects off of the surface of our objects. So, what do we want in this case we want to know how the sound reflects off or absorbs into the objects or maybe transmits through the objects or the diffraction that occurs. So, how does this happen? So, we have acoustic material properties and just like we had light sources we have sound sources right. You could have a point sound source or you could have some kind of parallel wave source maybe an entire vibrating virtual wall that makes parallel waves. So, we could generate those directly or in the case of a point sound source I guess we could make the same statement as we did for light that we never end up with truly parallel waves right. So, we have these propagating spherical wave fronts right. So, we could have point source or a parallel wave source like a vibrating plate we can talk about the loudness of the source just like we talk about the brightness of a light source alright. So, these are the modeling components that we have right just as we had for the visual case. Then we need to think about propagation through this virtual world that we are constructing. So, using the acoustic material properties we want to figure out how is the sound going to propagate and again we have all the things from before I will just write them here reflection diffraction could be 2s there refraction or transmission right. If we are moving right if the avatar is moving through VR we may also get the Doppler effect right or if some object is moving towards us and making a sound. So, that is something that we did not worry about that in the light case right. The red shift that occurs right in in light is useful for tracking the motion of stars in the sky for example right, but it does not end up being enough of a shift to be significant for VR, but here it ends up being important. So, the Doppler effect and overall amount of attenuation. So, waves get weaker as they propagate through the air at a more significant rate than light waves . So, attenuation. So, these are all important types of propagation or factors that are involved in propagation and if we divide up computational approaches we want to think about doing a computational approach. Remember we are making an alternate world generator right that is what we talked about very early on in the course we are making a kind of simulator to propagate this audio that is being constructed in the virtual world. So, there are 2 big alternatives I would say at the highest level we could do it what I would call in a numerical approach versus a combinatorial approach. In the combinatorial case we will use concepts like visibility or ray tracing is that look familiar right. So, the same kinds of concepts that we talked about and considered for a graphical rendering for visual displays the same things can be used for audio rendering. So, we can talk about propagation of sound and we can look at rays of sound as they propagate and reverberate in an environment. So, that is one possibility and you know this is fast and approximate in some kind of way and the question is going to be is it good enough. When we do this in computer graphics remember we looked at different shading models and we talked about how they were not physically realistic, but they seem good enough because they look fine on a screen. Sometimes they look fine in VR sometimes they do not and we have these difficulties to deal with right. People making computational simplifications by doing visibility based methods keeping them very simple not considering all of the propagations simplifying the materials as much as possible making things like the Blinfong shading model which is not physically accurate, but is very very fast computationally. So, the same kinds of choices will exist on the audio side, but it may be even more difficult to tell whether or not you have done it right right. You may hear the sounds, but can you correctly localize them in the same way as you would in the real world? Very difficult to determine that you have to do more difficult kinds of experiments with human subjects determine whether or not you have gotten it right. Whereas, in the case of visual maybe you can just look at it and say yeah looks fine right enough people look at it seems to be fine looks um physically realistic enough and people are happy with it. So, so you can go down this path, but again it becomes difficult to verify that these approximations are correct. You can go the numerical way which is write out partial differential equations you can calculate what is called the solution to the Helmholtz wave equation which I will not write here I will not make this a class on partial differential equations, but um in other words you are doing numerical PDE calculations um using things like a finite element methods and so forth.  So, the numerical computations propagate through the space you can imagine that this is very complex. This is equivalent in terms of difficulty to the full global illumination problem that we had for light right. If you want to do very very real physically realistic rendering then you again want to resort back to numerical computations and maybe even do all of the PDE calculations and people do that in computer graphics sometimes to make very highly photorealistic renderings. So, you have the same kinds of choices for audio you can go this direction or you can try to find some kind of combinatorial quick visibility ray tracing kinds of hacks let us say that are hopefully good enough. So, these choices um exist as well this one being very very expensive, but very physically accurate this one hopefully being good enough. I think there is a lot of research and a lot of development to be done in this side here to make um um fast and efficient methods just as was done in computer graphics across the 1970s and 80s when people had very limited hardware and they still nevertheless generated um very nice looking pictures and then eventually videos synthetically. So, we are in the same kind of place here with audio it is not known how much of these models and the acoustic material properties need to be fully specified how much of this information is going to be critical for a good audio experience you will hear something, but will it be reproduced in in the same kind of way as it would in the physical world giving the abilities to localize the source for example as you can in the real world and that could be very important for the type of experience that you are building. As I said in the beginning it depends on the task right what is the experience you are trying to make. So, if you are trying to make a um a horror experience right or maybe some kind of scary experience perhaps where the sounds are coming from in some kind of not very well lit environment might be a an important aspect of that right and so you might want to capture that very well. If you are just making an experience where you are just talking with your friends maybe some amount of localization is important, but maybe not a large amount right. So, depends on the application, but if you want to get these things right you may have to go further down this path unless we develop unless the community develops some very good um very fast methods here for generating synthetic sounds and propagating them in a way that is convincing questions about that. So, that is one step is modeling another step is propagation I want to talk about two more steps. So, three rendering, but one of the things that we have to take into account for rendering and rendering is going to be to determine what output needs to be given to the audio display which we may call speakers right. So, what needs to be presented there? Well one thing we have to do is we have to use the head position and orientation to determine the appropriate um let us say air pressure signal at the right and left ears just like we have to give the right visual information to your virtual right and left eyes in VR you have to figure out where the wave should be hitting your virtual ears in in um right and left ears in virtual reality. So, that means if you are moving your head around this has to be tracked and you have to adjust the sound that goes into your ears based on that. So, what goes into the audio display or the speaker should be dependent on your head position and orientation right. And if you grab on to a controller and move your character that will also change your position orientation in the virtual world even though it is not changing in the physical world the audio should be adjusted accordingly as well if you want to convince your brain that you are in fact moving which may even further contribute to this vestibular mismatch or maybe it helps that problem maybe it overwhelms when you put audio and visual together helps overwhelm the vestibular signal I do not know which one will happen you have to do experiments to see


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I'm Greg Conti, and I teach computer science and computer security at West Point. And I hope to do several things with this talk. One is to explore the process of conducting research, because I think a lot of people in the community are doing exceptional work, and it's something we as a community need to think about how we do it, and maybe there's some lessons learned we can learn from each other. For those new or thinking about it, hopefully this will inspire you to conduct research. And for those of you that have a great deal of experience in conducting research, hopefully there's some things in here that are new to you, many of which came through hard knocks. And while I've been doing security research for the past decade, I'm not claiming to have all the answers, but I do claim that I've spent a good bit of time thinking about this and helping other people do it as well. So again, I put a lot of effort into this, and hopefully you'll leave with some tools and techniques that you can apply to your own work. I'm here as a free citizen and not a representative of any government. So what is research? Research to me is the search for knowledge, trying to find something new, something that hasn't been discovered before, maybe to solve a problem. Sometimes it's done rigorously using the scientific method. Sometimes it's done informally. And here's how I like to think about it. If you look at the gray sphere in the lower left, that line, I think of that as a present. And then you can look out 10, 50 years. And going back a little into the past, things that we've already discovered, we have things like books. It's well-synthesized information, exists in libraries, and then college courses. And then as you approach the edge of human knowledge, you hit graduate courses. You hit talks at Black Hat or DEF CON, and they appear at the edge. And those could also be research papers. And the idea then is to not rediscover fire. The idea is to find something someone else hasn't done and fill in the blank and push out collectively the edge of human knowledge. Unfortunately, there are pockets of knowledge out there that we don't have access to. It could be hidden behind paywalls. It could be in classified archives. You may have heard of GCHQs, claimed to have discovered public key encryption. It could be proprietary information that isn't shared. But the idea, though, is if you'd make a discovery and you're at the edge, you have this ability to look outward and predict, and you see the problems. Look farther than anyone else has seen, and identify other problems that can be solved, other questions that can be answered. And then even farther out, you have science fiction authors, maybe 50, 100, 1,000 years out that are just speculating about the future. And I think there are many science fiction fans in the audience. I know I am. And you can draw great inspiration from those authors. So why conduct research at all? Well, I mean, it's in many ways. To me, it's about advancing human knowledge. You're doing something that we benefit from others' work, and we're giving something back. And one of the most pleasurable experiences is doing something and seeing someone else build upon it. And along the way, you can make yourself an expert in a given area because you've specialized in it. And you pick up new skills, and frankly, it's fun. Hackers in particular have a great deal to offer when conducting research. First, let me say it's great to have resources like Wikimedia Commons that you can search on Coloring Book and find pictures of someone who's uploaded their child's photo of coloring outside the lines royalty-free. So it's pretty cool that they make that available. But what hackers bring to the table is this native curiosity. Folks are clever in the hacker community. They like to color outside the lines. Often, they do excellent work. And importantly, they have less constraints. If you think of industry, they have to really show value to the bottom line. In academia, they tend to be like dogs on the hunt, sniffing for the latest research grants. But the hacker community can choose things that are fun and interesting and just important to them. So this sounds pretentious, the idea of seeking to be the world expert, but it really isn't. I'd argue that we've got probably 100 world experts sitting in this room in some particular area and many well on their way. And those are the people that are at the edge. They can see important problems and either work on themselves or help tip off somebody else that maybe you want to take a look at this problem. And Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers came up, he did a spouted research that said there's like a magic number of how much effort you need to put in to become world class in something. And the magic amount of time was 10,000 hours. And there's people in this room that have put 10,000 hours in and probably some with 20 and some on that path. Because people, you know, if you get it, you get it and you're into it, you put a tremendous amount of time in and you gain momentum. As a Dungeons and Dragons player, I can't help but think in terms of experience points. That you can single class and put all your experience points into one area to get depth. Or you can multi-class and put your experience points into many different areas. So you progress farther, but you gain breath. And in research, you're focusing in one particular area or a small group of areas, but it's also important to balance that with breath. So you understand the context of what you're doing. And if you get a little bit off, in academia, I see that if you get a little bit off someone's specialty area, they don't know what they're talking about because they lack breath. So it's a balance that we seek. So let's look at some strategies for finding problems. Because sometimes that's the hardest thing. How do you find an important problem or something that you think you can get traction on? One strategy is challenging assumptions. And I would say the hacker community is very good at that. There's things that we think about or don't think about that oftentimes should be challenged. One is the idea, perhaps, of a hard drive wipe. It's conventional wisdom that you wipe a hard drive and all of a sudden, if you have a malware infestation, it's gone. Well, maybe it'd be interesting to dig more deeply and say, well, what can live past a hard drive wipe somewhere in the system of the computer? Another is to think very big.  And this is Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis. They did an entire two month survey of the entire IPv4 space. You can also think very small. And these are showing the individualizations of individual bytes within files. And thinking very, very big, thinking very, very small are interesting ways to approach problems. And a classic technique. Irritating software, hardware, protocols, and people in ways that they weren't designed to handle. And that's often a fruitful response. You can try and detect patterns. We all have news sources, information flows that we bring in, books that we read, people that we talk to, that we, over time, though, you sense patterns. You sense things, emerging patterns that might be important to look at. For example, one might be Bitcoin. You might be watching it and you see enough samples come by in the news sources and you'd say, this is important for me to take a look at. Another is to try and sense a need. I wanted to buy a book, I wanted to buy this book. And I went on and found out that it's no longer in print. And that the two copies available on Amazon started at $679. So there's some used booksellers making some money if anyone buys books at that price. But the idea is you can sense a need and maybe that's an opportunity of where you can explore some more. Another powerful technique is to look at the intersection of your interest areas, your expertise areas. For me, HCI and security, I took a look at that intersection. And you can see things that popped out were malicious interface design. Because your average HCI person doesn't think about an adversary or the designer as an adversary. And so it's useful to sketch out Venn diagrams of what you're interested in and look at the intersections. Another would be just crazy intersections. For example, I have a friend who has carpal tunnel and also likes to use nunchucks. This crazy combination, but there's something here that she told me that when she uses nunchucks, her carpal tunnel gets better. I don't know, it's a data point of one. But it might be worth a little bit of exploration to see if that's actually a technique to help improve your carpal tunnel. It may be illegal in the state of New York and other states, but it might be something worth exploring. Or maybe it's like medical use marijuana. You could have nunchucks if you had carpal tunnel syndrome. Another strategy is what makes you mad? Do ice cubes fall on the floor when you try and get a cup of ice out of your refrigerator? Maybe you can look at doing that better. For me, a tipping point in that malicious interface research was when a flying vodka bottle appeared flying over the weather when I was trying to just see what the weather was. And a man came out at the bottom and toasted.  Or maybe it's a flicker in the status bar of your browser. And you see these third-party sites. And maybe that tips you off to something that you can explore more deeply. So what makes you mad? Certain technologies, you just have to ask what could possibly go wrong? This is a self-wiping hard drive from Toshiba. I don't know if anything's wrong with it, but it just sure sounds like something bad could happen. Another is a new file format from Wolfram Research that claims it's as every day as a document, but as interactive as an application. To me, that's a combination that might merit further exploration. Because what could possibly go wrong? And if you're short of ideas on what could possibly go wrong, you could go to slash. And people will tag things for you to give you ideas. Another common strategy, powerful strategy, is just looking under rocks, poking in corners where people haven't looked before. And we've seen that with the GPS phone tracking databases. People lifted a lid, took a peek, and saw things that largely weren't well known. Here's an example of a multi-function printer. What goes into it? A network cable and a phone cable into the same device. Has anyone thought, can those two be bridged? I don't know, but that's a rock you might want to take a look at. It took a look under. Looking at something old, the DNS, so you can go back if you see old technologies. That's usually a sign that maybe you can dig a little more deeply. Or look at something new. Again, don't know if there's a vulnerability here, but Google makes web pages load instantly. The Chrome browser will soon silently fetch pages as you scan search results so that they will load without delay. I don't know about you, but I hesitate before clicking on certain links and don't really want my browser preloading them for me because what could possibly go wrong? So you see these things. And assuredly, people are looking at the security of this. But it just tips you off that maybe it's an area for exploration. You can also extend or generalize work that's already been done. There's been work on fingerprinting the sensors within digital cameras. And here's a paper from it. And they say, well, how could I extend that? Well, you could look or generalize it. Well, think of all sensors. What types of sensors broadly could be fingerprinted? Can microphones be fingerprinted, such that this recording here could be an MP3 tied back to this specific microphone? Or what other sensors leave unique noise or some aspect that can be fingerprinted? So you can extend, you can generalize. And of course, science fiction provides ample ideas. And this is the Diamond Age. And remember the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer, which is basically a tablet computer with artificial intelligence designed to teach children. You can draw tremendous inspiration from these. My personal favorite probably is assuming the worst in people, that you need to look at the capabilities of what a given company person or government has. And it's just a useful thought experiment to think about problems. We've seen examples in the past. And to look at the incentives. And you've seen real player software or spyware, the Sony root kit, and then some really crazy Facebook privacy interfaces. Another thought experiment is to think like a nation state. What would you do if you had god-like access to the network? What would you do if you had near unlimited processing power? That's just useful ways to think about problems. There's calls for papers for various events. And they'll list ideas. So if you're looking for something, you can go out and find them. And this is from the Usenix Leap workshop. But DEF CON, all the major events have calls for papers with ideas. And then the research themselves. If you're in a talk here, or you're in Black Hat, or you look at academic papers, they'll often tell you, here's where they've seen where to go next. They'll tell you where to go next if you listen. And the same thing in the written documents. And finally, a good survey article. If you're still interested in general area, but you don't want to get too deep into one thing, you could do a survey article. And by survey article, I mean you survey the current state of the art. And that might be for security visualization. It would be to go out and look at all the security visualization tools out there, compare and contrast them. Just that alone, a current version of that, is something you could publish and would be of interest.  If you might have identified a gap or an interesting area, and you can move forward. OK. So with research, though, it helps to have a system, a strategy, a time, a place. If you have a question, or a question you're looking at, or a topic you're trying to delve more deeply into. So one is constantly feeding your mind and choosing your news sources and getting things away from the keyboard, analog hobbies. And it's, again, creating those crazy intersections. Many people have different paths to learning. And I think ultimately, and this is kind of a holy war, but certificates, training, college, self-taught, each is a path to learning. And you have to find the combination that works for you.  Maybe you learn advanced data mining techniques that have never been applied before against a given problem. So you have new tools that you can combine to solve a given problem in a different way. It's very important, I think, to write down your ideas. I tend to do this obsessively. And when I was talking with friends before this talk, they said, oh, we remember everything. Like, really? I mean, I feel like me, I think writing it down, it puts a timestamp on your record. It allows you to recreate what you've done. And that moment of brilliance, it doesn't just dissipate. You've got it, you've captured it. And if you ever have to prove at a certain point in time you came up with an idea, this can be very helpful for doing so. And it just, it's a good way to brainstorm and record ideas in a formal way. And then there's other techniques you can use. One, I like giant pads of paper. I think those giant post-it notes all around someone's office would be very cool. And but there's many tools out there. But amidst the space, you've got these problems now, things that you've identified. But, and life is short though, as is time. And you have to find something that the time is right, something that you can get traction on, that you can make a dent in. I have a friend who developed a meme streams, which was a site, a social, it was a site kind of like slash dot.  And so ideas can be too early, they can be too late. So you have to time it a bit and wait for things to mature. You can't really think about solving a problem matter of a few days. Oftentimes, these harder problems you have to chip away at. And at first you don't feel like you're making any progress. But over a month, over time you'll, even if you just write a paragraph or a sentence and make it a little contribution, it adds up over time towards a final goal. And it's important as you're trying to do this to build on what others have done. You don't want to rediscover fire. And this is a great picture of standing on shoulders of giants that I went out and there's some great stuff out there. But it allows you to avoid duplicating what others have done and use that to energize what you're doing. You may encounter paywalls along the way where like various digital libraries but oftentimes the authors themselves or either have it posted online are happy to share if you send them a note. And as you collect pieces of information you can quickly become overwhelmed. Again, you may think, oh, I've got 10, I've got 50, it's not a big deal. But over time you can get this huge mass, it's unmanageable. So there are various tools out there probably the most famous is EndNote that allow you to organize and add keywords and create a searchable database. And even some of them allow you to push it into a word processor if you want to create a citation for some reason. So being able to keep found things found is the purpose of these tools. Organizing your data. I did some research, a forensic research of a million binary fragments. I didn't use the best naming scheme and every time I go in I have to spend half an hour trying to figure out what I did. So putting thought into how you organize your data at the start is very helpful. The target may move and that's okay. You're gonna circle in toward a goal and you may find out someone's done it or it's not achievable and you slide, you're flexible and you slide to something else and that's part of the process. You may find that it's a blind alley. Well, that's research is search and search again.  Finding other people to help you along the way. From my experience, it's better to have people close, people in your local community that you can work with. You can still do it distributed but I would avoid against cold calling people and just sending them papers and the like to say, would you mind reading this? That generally doesn't go over well, particularly William Gibson has a great note on his site where people say, how can I get in touch with you?  They will then compost your letter, allow it to ferment for several months and eventually send it to me. I will then neglect to reply. So you probably don't wanna collaborate with him. But who can you collaborate with? Well, there's DC groups, 2,600 meetings, hacker spaces, industry groups, user groups, colleges all in your local community and who all can share depending on what your topic is share a passion. And at a minimum they can provide feedback and it's very powerful way to refine your idea and move it forward. And I mentioned before the idea of this isn't something, I've had cadets like we'll write something one day and turn it in the next. They don't even read it again. They just turn it in sometimes. And it's much better if you chip away and you put something down for a few days, pick it up a few days later and really refine something into work that you're proud of. If you're thinking about publishing in a forum like or almost any forum like a magazine, they'll have author guidelines. It's usually, I'd recommend reading them because they tell you what they want and they get overwhelmed. So it's easier if you provide something that tries to match what they're looking for and falls their norms. If you have the opportunity to work with an editor, pay attention to what they change. For me, this is from the security visualization book I wrote and the author or the editor, marked it up again and again, but I took a look at each change and asked myself why or even talked to the editor. Why did you do this? Because they're specialists in this type of thing. So you can learn a lot.  Research requires time, often unbroken chunks of time. If you think if you're a programmer and you're trying to program and your manager comes in and interrupts what you're doing with a meeting, you're cruising altitude and all of a sudden you're crashed and you may or may not be able to get back up to where you're productive again. And Neil Stevenson in his Why I'm a Bad Correspondent has some great quotes on this. Writing novels is hard and requires vast unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Or if I know that I'm going to be interrupted, I can't concentrate. And if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can't do anything at all. Now life tends to intrude on our large chunks of time. And G.H. Hardy says, no mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics more than any other art or science is a young man's game. And why you ask? Well, you may pick up one of these, either husband or wife, and you'll find that life or time starts to evaporate or one of these. And again, you have a baby time evaporate. So it's all about keeping balance in your life but still finding chunks of time. And that might mean finding a place where you're creative. For example, interesting meetings, classes or talks will spark your creativity. Or for me, boring meetings, classes and talks, that I just bring a book and pretend I'm paying attention. I'm often most productive there. For others, it may be a bar or a food court or an airplane. And I'd encourage people to think beyond just a single problem. Once you kind of have a lane in mind, think about a series of things you're trying to accomplish. For me, in online privacy, which is an area I'm very passionate about, I think not just what do I do now, but what do I do next? Maybe I write a paper for a technical audience and then I write a white paper for decision makers and that they can understand and maybe affect policy in a positive way. And then I have strategies along the way, like three or four objectives and maybe what to do if it's something's not accepted, the plan B. Now I have a friend who's a military history buff who, when I showed him this, said that really wasn't the best one campaign graphic to use because that was the British and they lost in the, and in many ways our ability to do research is an economic problem. If you have to have a day job to work in a band at night, it's a problem, right? It cuts down on your time. And as Mudge mentioned at Black Hat for those that caught it, there are some programs out there that can provide funding, but typically they require a lot of meta work, a lot of writing giant proposals, lots of strings attached and lots of competition. I'm optimistic about what Mudge announces DARPA Cyber Fast Track that may be a way to bring some dollars in. I typically, what I do is at night and on weekends on my own time. So it's good to see things like that out there, particularly the focus on hacker spaces. All right, so what are some methodologies? Of course, the scientific method, if you haven't looked recently, it's a good way to think about problems, the idea, ask a question, do your background research, find out what other people have done and then construct a hypothesis and test it and then analyze your results and report on them in some way. It's useful to think about scientific method when conducting research. Another place to look is, I pulled this from the National Science Foundation, but it's a good way to think about, they're talking about conserving their dollars and choosing the right problems. Same thing with all of us. We have a very limited amount of time. What problems should we work on? And what they use are criteria called intellectual merit and broader impacts. What is this a transformative technology? Does it explore something creative and new? And what is its impact on society? Does it have a major long-standing impact? And not everything you do has to have that, but those are just good things to keep in mind when you're trying to balance the few projects you can actually accomplish in your lifetime. You may run into, I collide with others in idea space. It happens all the time. I mean, there's even a Wikipedia article on multiple discoveries, but it happens all the time. And you can either, maybe if they're user-friendly, you can bring them into your group and you all work together. Or you may find that you, even though you did due diligence and tried to research, but you missed someone's work, what can you do? You did due diligence. In the future, you note that that occurred, acknowledge that person's work, maybe build upon it and cite it and move on. And this is a holy war. Again, it's beyond the scope of the talk today, but when you do security research, you have to think about the ways that you disclose it. And there's various strategies for doing so. And if you search online, plenty of good discussions illustrating both sides of it, of the debate. And I'm not a lawyer, but keeping your personal research distinct from your employer is probably a good idea. And the advice I had been given in the past is not to let your personal work touch the time or resources like computing resources of your employer because they may gain some rights over it. So being very distinct in protecting what you're working on as a personal project. Although I think smart employers recognize that if they want talented people, they have to give them, create an environment where they can have their own IP or at least a share of their own IP. And in some cases, if for example, when I wrote the books, I had to go to my employer, tell them what I was doing so they weren't surprised and then go through these guidelines of keeping work distinct from my personal work. And then you've done this research and you say, well, what type of outputs can I have for maximum effect? I like to think of in terms of artifacts, things that you leave behind that others can use to build upon. And a video of a talk, a set of PowerPoint slides is good, but the idea is, can someone else reproduce what you've done? And by publishing, it allows you in some fashion, it allows you to contribute to the body of knowledge, but also to get feedback on what you've done, maybe build your reputation or find others interested in the problem. And importantly, it puts a timestamp on your work. You've got out there, because I think a lot of hacker community research just is not well known in certain circles and it's incredibly powerful and it's almost dismissed or it's pulled into research without properly citing it. Getting things out there puts a timestamp on it and will help prevent that. And the idea of reproducibility, creating things that you leave behind and histories of replete with technologies that we no longer know how to do them. The Strativarius violins are probably the best example. Just those technologies are lost and we're trying to avoid that. Research papers provide a useful way to think about problems, whether you're reading them or trying to write them or even thinking about a way to structure a talk on a subject. It's a time-tested way to think about problems and to create artifacts. Whether you write them or not, it's just a useful outline though. And it starts off with the background and motivation. That's the who cares, why and so what of the problem. And it gets into related work. What other people have done? So in this one package, this capsule, they're telling you what other people have done and why theirs is different. And then the core of it, the design, implementation, evaluation of some activity, system or experiment. And it wraps up with future work. Again, they're pointing you toward the future. And importantly, references. So you can go back, as you're trying to dig deeply into an area, you can find out what references they use to build theirs. You might find new ones. And you'll find as you explore an area, eventually you'll find everything that's been done. And it might just be 10 or 20 different little papers or articles, and then all of a sudden, you've got a pretty good understanding of the state of the art. And as you seek to publish, there's many different forums. I think great places to start are magazines, maybe writing a book chapter, serving as a technical reviewer for a book even, serving on panels and talks or writing white papers. Those are all things that are accessible. And in academia, there's a hierarchy, poster sessions.  And you kind of see some of that going on here. There's an analog here. And the idea then is you go up this hierarchy, you refine the idea more and more. And then it goes to say a technical report that self-published, maybe a workshop where people dig into a particular problem, and then more general conferences and then a journal which is supposed to be this archival thing. So that's the academic model. If you're thinking about writing academic papers, I strongly, or like a research paper in a workshop or something like that that's academic, I strongly encourage you to work with someone like a grad student because in academia, there's almost like this code, there's this writing style, this way of discussing things. It's not necessarily intuitive, but that's what they're learning. So it can be frustrating if you don't have that. Work can be awesome, but sometimes you'll just get with viewers that don't, it's foreign to them and they don't understand. Just trust me. And then at the bottom right, I've got just a few venues that I respect and I think might be open to hackerish type research. Usenik's Leet, the first Monday, the open publication format journal, IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine, Make Magazine, and then the whole hacker scene magazines like 2600 and many others. And as you think about, say academic security conferences, there's about a hundred of them and they vary in quality. And probably the best example of that are who's familiar with the MIT students that built the automatic paper generator? All right, yeah, that was a pretty good hack there. So they wrote a paper that they had a database of papers and this thing would just randomly take snippets and create using the exact right format and structure, just gibberish papers. And they got router accepted at WMSCI 2005. And then I thought that was awesome because there's some forums out there. You really don't want your name associated with it. And regardless of where you're trying to publish, it's good to do some reconnaissance or some research. Imagine trying to come to an event like DEF CON for the first time and then speaking at it. It could be, if you don't understand the context. So it's useful to do some research on where you're thinking about publishing, either online if it's or off or in person. You can even self publish. There's a great talk, self publishing in the underground from DEF CON 15 that talks about self publishing strategies. Or you might want to work with a publisher on a book at some point. And a question that comes up is, well, how are the calculations for royalties made? And I thought I'd just include an example in here. And this is Ballpark, but I checked with the publisher two days ago just to double check my math and agreed with me. So if the cover of a book is $50, the publisher may sell that book typically for $25 or so to a company like Amazon, to a distributor. Then you're given a percentage of what the publisher makes, which is Ballpark 12% of the $25. So on a $50 book, the author may make $3 per book. Then the question is, are you going to sell 100,000 copies and pay off your mortgage? Or are you going to sell 3,000 copies and buy a Stairmaster? Well, frankly, the advice I got from the publisher I was talking to said, you don't expect to get rich. I mean, 3,000, 5,000 copies, a pretty good run for a book. People have exceeded that and there are 100,000, I think, steal this computer book, for example, went over 100,000. But it's just good to know, $50 book, $3. But there's other benefits, right, by doing this. You create a long-term artifact. You gain some, perhaps some reputation, some exposure that'll bring in consulting gigs or media opportunities. And ultimately though, you have to do a lot of marketing yourself if you want to really push it up and over. For me, it took 14 months of free time for each book. Your mileage may vary. So some parting thoughts. Don't self-censor. Good research is often disruptive to the status quo. And I think the hacker community excels at that. So don't be afraid to choose something that's controversial. Be fearless when you can. Develop a sense for open problems. And that comes by knowing a space. And many in the hacker community do that. You're already doing research, right? So you find, develop a sense for open problems, where the holes are, and you can share them with others or work on them yourself. Also develop a sense for important problems. So now you know the open problems, but how do you prioritize them? And Richard Hamming wrote a very, or believe it was a talk called You and Your Research. And he was talking about Nobel Prize-winning work, but I think it still applies for everybody to think about, what are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on one of them? If not, why not? So it's a good way to think about it. It's a bit pretentious, but it's a good way to think about these things. And my most favorite quote from this talk is from Paul Graham about procrastination. The most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff. And I think that's important. When you go back to that chunks of time, you can actually get anything done.  So I know programmers that shut down their email and their instant messaging or whatever to be able to focus on a problem, maybe unplug the phone.  Of course the silly stuff may be important to our employers and you can't be totally ignored, but it's important to think about. It's also, balance is important. How much do you input? How much knowledge do you absorb? Some people just absorb, absorb, absorb, absorb and they're brilliant, but they don't output anything. And what type of, how much coding do you do? How much processing do you do of the data? So finding a balance that you learn things, you do something with them and output things is a balance you have to seek. And this was suggested by my friend Sergei that DEFCON, BlackHack, all the major hacker conferences, textfiles.com, have tremendous archives available. But it's almost to the point now, it's so rich, there's so much information out there that it's hard to find. You say, what was that talk on, I tried for this, there was this great talk on media relations that I was trying to find to mention. And I was at Hope, I think, and I don't remember and it's like every other year and you're trying to find this. So as we look to the future, maybe we can see a search engine created or like a library that points to these documents. It has this tag with metadata that's searchable in some way. Also playing to your strengths, right? So academia follows the grant money like dogs on a hunt sometimes. Industry, you have to make a case for the bottom line. But hackers, you've got many advantages. Passion, you know the real world problems, right? Oftentimes, that aren't known in academia. The, you have perhaps time, you may be fearless. You may be immune to the law in certain ways. You may be obsessed or you have a diverse background or diverse friends or diverse access to data. Those are all strengths that can be leveraged. It's also important to fight uninformed law and this comes from FX and some of his colleagues, Fina Lit website, it says honored visitor. Much to our regret, this site is no longer available in the form it has been since the late 1990s. It became illegal. So we have to, if you're in the security research, you got to watch the law in your country to make sure it's not going and do what you can to fight back because there's a lot of benefits to hacker research. A strategy can be finding inspiration others you respect. Whoever they may be. Oftentimes, sometimes they'll have an online presence and you can look and say, how did this person do these things? And you can follow what they've done or just people who don't have online presence but you just respect them. You can talk to them about how they did what they did. So not my car, I wish it was. Wikimedia Commons again has pictures of Ferraris but the license plate was actually real. I saw it at a conference in Washington, a security conference in Washington and I was in the parking garage. Didn't know if I was in the right place because I was a little lost and I pulled in the parking garage and parked next to the knob sled. I knew I was in the right place. And the journey itself has many dividends, right? Whether you find the cure for cancer or not, you learn so much along the way and maybe make some contributions. And Donald Rumsfeld very famous for his quotes on knowing what you know and don't know and the like but the key idea is some of the smartest people I know aren't afraid to ask questions. And I try to do the same and I encourage you to ask questions too. And this picture, you may wonder why there's a picture of cats and ducks but that's what Google thinks happy is. So I searched on happy and then this was one of the top ones and I thought it's fine. There were some other happy things in there that I didn't wanna put in to the slides. But kittens and ducks is probably safe. But here the idea is don't let this search for novelty, the critics, the reviewers that may give you a hard time cause they don't get what you're doing or some frustrations in publishing. Get in the way of good hacking and fun, right? You know, that's what it's all about. Life's short. So the final thing is this is doable. The research space isn't as crowded as you'd think and there's incredibly talented people here. So just encouraging you to go out and dig in and this is a doable thing. Don't be like me and think you can't do it. Lots of people to thank. And I've also, these will be posted on the website but, and this is a list of papers on that if you're thinking about publishing there's some ideas here and some books on problem solving that I've looked at or read and recommend. Okay, so I can't see. No one's giving me, I think I've got about seven minutes. So any questions? Oh, my website is, it's gregconzi.com. It's cheesy, yes, gregconzi.com. But it'll all speed up on the Black Hat website. I'm sorry, the Def Con website. Good, whoever turned down the lights, thank you. I'm not blind anymore. Are there microphones or are there microphones? So if anyone has questions, feel free to ask. Okay.