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 this list of names + affiliation, I was able to write a quick python script (code below) that goes down the list and googles each name + affiliation in a new chrome tab. Now, instead of having to copy/paste or type in each name, all we have to do is click on their homepage and find the information we need, while spending minimal time actually entering the names into google.
This is a pretty big win - we plan to hand this process off to our undergraduate researcher, Jennie, who is going through and getting all this info for us!
Of course, we could have taken this even further and tried to automate finding their homepages and emails, but at some point we have to consider this relevant XKCD
Below is the code for opening every line of standard input in a new chromium tab:
#!/usr/bin/python3
#usage: cat data.txt | python3 autogoogler.py
import sys
from subprocess import call
#Stdin should be whatever the lines are (researcher + affiliation works great)
for line in sys.stdin:
line = line.strip()
#opens as a google search in a new tab
call(["chromium-browser", "https://google.com/search?safe=off&q=" + line])
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 this list of names + affiliation, I was able to write a quick python script (code below) that goes down the list and googles each name + affiliation in a new chrome tab. Now, instead of having to copy/paste or type in each name, all we have to do is click on their homepage and find the information we need, while spending minimal time actually entering the names into google.
This is a pretty big win - we plan to hand this process off to our undergraduate researcher, Jennie, who is going through and getting all this info for us!
Of course, we could have taken this even further and tried to automate finding their homepages and emails, but at some point we have to consider this relevant XKCD
Below is the code for opening every line of standard input in a new chromium tab:
#!/usr/bin/python3
#usage: cat data.txt | python3 autogoogler.py
import sys
from subprocess import call
#Stdin should be whatever the lines are (researcher + affiliation works great)
for line in sys.stdin:
line = line.strip()
#opens as a google search in a new tab
call(["chromium-browser", "https://google.com/search?safe=off&q=" + line])
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