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Showing posts from October, 2018

Automate all the things!

We plan to reach out to as many experts in the security field as possible. The more respondents we get, the better! There's just one problem. How do you get emails for a bunch of security professors? Even more so, how do you even find a list with just their names? Thankfully, we can answer the second question. Conference proceedings for security and security-education conferences (Usenix and ASE) both contain experts' names and affiliations.  After spending a few hours manually googling author's names to find their emails, Al suggested we try to automate the process as much as possible. How much benefit could that have, I thought? At the end of the day, we still have to manually click on their homepages or find their email somewhere online. We decided to see how much benefit automation could get us, and the end result is pretty cool. Al wrote a regular expression to pull  that goes through and finds the names of all the authors, as well as their affiliation. Then, given