D. A. Flores

Presentation Skills (RSSP-3)

2018-02-21T20:00:00.000-08:00

Date and Time: 21 February 2018, 13:00 - 17:00

This workshop was very useful to understand the techniques to deliver effective presentation, and at the same time, managing the allocated time properly. Actually, for delivering excellent presentations, these skills must be practiced consistent and continiously so that we can learn to manage nerves when pushed out of our comfort zone.

For presentations to be effective, we must balance 4 important aspects of communication:

Words
Listening Skills
Verbal Communication Skills
Body Language

In case of Body Language, it is always useful adopting a neutral default stance (feet on the ground, hands down) because this position allows breathing for managing nerves and to present ourselves in a more approachable way.

When using verbal communication, it is important to control our intonation, pauses, pitch and pace. Intonation allows highlighting important points during our speech whilst making pauses helps us to deliver concise ideas and managin nerves. On the other hand, pitching our voice allows to confidently communicate our ideas and project our voice in a proper manner. Finally, managin pace its important to allow the audience to understand our ideas.

I think this experience will help me to manage my time properly to communicate the content that my audience will be interested in receiving. Particularly, I enjoyed practicing and using the Power of Three and the MuSiC filter (Must Know, Should Know and Could Know) in order to identify the key points in my presentation depending the audience and the time given.

Algorithmic Bias Considerations – societal impacts and regulatory

2018-02-01T21:00:00.000-08:00

Date and Time: 01 February 2018, 16:00 - 17:00

Abstract

Dr. Ansgar Koene

Despite warnings about Bias in Computer Systems going back to at least 1992, it has taken concerted efforts by groups of researchers like FAT/ML (Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning) and news and media reports highlighting discriminatory effects
in data driven algorithms (e.g. recidivism prediction) to dispel the naïve-optimistic myth that the logic/mathematics of computation would automatically results in objectively unbiased outcomes.

Starting from a brief overview of key challenges in the design and use of data driven algorithmic decision making systems I will focus in on the inherently socio-technical nature of real-world applications that give rise to concerns about bias. I will present some of the findings of
the UnBias project on the lived experience and concerns of teenaged digital natives regarding their interactions with algorithmically mediated services and discuss the ongoing work of the IEEE P7003 working group for developing a “Standard for Algorithmic Bias Considerations”.
I will conclude with a review of some of the policy making initiatives that were recently launched by professional associations (e.g. ACM principles; IEEE Global Initiative on Ethical Considerations in AI
and Autonomous Systems), industry led organizations (e.g. Partnership on AI) and regional/national government bodies (e.g. EC Algorithmic Awareness Building; TransAlgo in France; UK parliamentary...

I think that it is very relevant to my field to have knowledge about how research groups are targeting efforts to prevent discrimination in algorithms. This speech covered topics such as accountability and transparency of algorithms, which are related to my field of study in digital forensics.

I would like to incorporate some of the notions about preventing algorithmic bias which are being elaborated by professional associations such as IEEE, ACM and ISO in order to justify the importance of accountability in fairness and provenance of evidence.

Networking for Researchers (RSSP-13)

2018-01-23T19:00:00.000-08:00

Date and Time: 23 January 2018, 11:30 - 12:45

RSSP workshop that for some reason I was booked in, but it wasn't included in my Activity Log. I decided to create an entry for this event.
Date and Time: 23 January 2018, 11:30 - 12:45 ( I made the entry to last till 13:00 so 1 credit can be split in the areas).

From the perspective of a researcher, it is very useful to take advantage of networking to engage with broader audiences and be able to communicate effectively your research. I think this workshop was very useful to learn techniques to listen, engage, communicate and follow up conversations with peers so that we can build and maintain possible opportunities to collaborate in the future.

A lot of useful tips were shared in this session such as active listening, body language, mirroring and establishing a 'pitch'. This was a very good training session that will provide me with the skills to be more approachable and handle conversations with easy; in particular, when attending conferences or seminars that require social interaction.

Using Social Media for Researchers (RSSP-12)

2018-01-23T03:45:00.003-08:00

Date and Time: 23 January 09:30 - 11:00

Being aware of our online identity is very important if you're looking forward to building up your reputation as a professional or as an academic. I think that social media is a very important and powerful tool that can enable us to achieve this objective. However, not knowing how to use this tools can be very counterproductive. This workshop was very informative so that we can get to know social networking tools and use them effectively.

In the short term, the knowledge acquired in this workshop will help me to build a more effective social media strategy to disseminate my research to a more specific and useful audience. I think I will be more productive in social networks that will help me out to build my profile as a researcher, such as LinkedIn and ResearchGate.

PGR Professional Development Forum (GS1)

2018-01-22T18:00:00.000-08:00

Date and Time: 22 January 2018, 10:30 - 12:30

This was a very good opportunity to discuss and share thoughts about my experience as both a researcher and a student at Warwick. I think that a lot of questions were answered about the engagement with the PGR Development Framework and the RSSP workshops. Also, we were able to suggest more inclusive leisure activities tailored to the needs and realities of mature PG students.

Having attended this workshop will be very useful in the short term to see changes and opportunities reflected in the workshop available for booking and the skills that we are interested in developing. For example, I do hope that more specific training by discipline/research interest can be included with more frequency and schedule availability on SkillsForge.

Planning Your Publication Strategy: Journals (Science & Medicine) (RSSP-23 )

2018-01-16T18:00:00.000-08:00

Date and Time: 16 January 2018, 11:00 - 12:30

It is well-known that researchers MUST publish, communicate and establish collaboration with their field of expertise. However, not having a strategy to publish our research may be very frustrating and time consuming; especially in academic journals, which turnaround is longer than conferences. In this workshop, I learnt that publishing in journals require a strategy in order to identify potential good journals than can help us boost our research profile.

I think in the short term, this workshop will help me to identify journals based on their impact factor so that my research can have a broader visibility and recognition. Also, having this in mind, I have to consider the journal turnaround, author guidelines and peer review policies in order to avoid being rejected due to bad formating or policy misconduct.

Planning Your Publication Strategy: The Essentials (RSSP-22)

2017-11-23T19:00:00.000-08:00

Date and Time: 23 November 2017, 14:00 - 16:00

This workshop helped me to understand why I want to communicate my research and how to do it in an effective way so that people can have an insight of what my research is about and what I am currently working on. It also helped me to be aware of predatory publishers who can actually damage my reputation as researcher and prevent me from using my own work in the future.

As a researcher, one of my worst regrets is having been caught by a predatory publisher. This experience was very discouraging because an article I produced as a result of my MSc. dissertation does not have the visibility I woud have liked to have. I think in the future I will be more careful about finding publishing opportunities.

Speed reading and note-taking (RSSP-7)

2017-11-06T20:00:00.000-08:00

Date and Time: 06 November 2017, 12:00 - 14:00

Being more effective to read and make relevant notes at the same is a big struggle for me. This workshop helped me to understand techniques such as skimming and scanning to effectively read documents. Also, a lot of tips were given to the students to improve reading articles, for example reading the abstract carefully, explore briefly related work and examine the conclusions to gave a gist of what the article is about and how useful it may be.

Applying these techniques I think will be a time saver in my research; particularly because I'm exploring a new method at the moment which has been little used and have not been extensively explained in theory. Finding relevant articles can be a daunting tasks, but if I can get a gist of them quicker, then I will have to use the most relevant and archive the others which may, or may not, be used in my research.

Reputation mechanisms: A machine learning perspective

2017-10-26T22:30:00.000-07:00

Date and Time: 26 October 2017, 16:00 - 17:00

Abstract:

Phil Taylor, University of Warwick

Trust and reputation allow agents to make informed decisions about potential interactions. Trust in an agent is derived from direct experience with that agent, while reputation is determined by the experiences reported by other witness agents with potentially differing viewpoints. These experiences can be represented in tuples describing the situation and outcomes of the interaction, or depicted in detail as is possible with provenance records. These experiences are typically aggregated in a trust and reputation model, of which there are several types that focus on different aspects. Such aspects include handling subjective perspectives of witnesses, dishonesty, or assessing the reputation of new agents. This talk distills reputation into its fundamental aspects, discussing first how trust and experiences and reputation information is represented and second how it is disseminated among agents. A unifying abstraction for reputation systems is presented, along example instantiations of models found in the literature. Finally, the abstraction is instantiated using machine learning approaches to pave the way for in depth analysis of provenance records for trust and reputation assessments.

This seminar was very useful to have a different perspective of what trust and provenance mean from a machine learning perspective.
In the context of this seminar, the presenter intorduced Trust as a personal belief that an agent will act in the expected way. Whereas Reputation is an aggregation of trust as a collective view which is impersonal and unreliable.
To illustrate this perspective, case studies were presented about on-demand taxi services, logistics and car leasing.

I think this seminar helped me to see provenance and trust from outside the digital forensics perspective. As I am working with attributes of provenance as an element to justify evidential trust (chain of custody), this seminar gave me a very interesting perspective to consider the role of reputation in proactive database forensics. For example, considering the level of trust on database users and roles in order to guarantee and justify that a piece of data hasn't been modified, and if so why? who? and when?

Practical Project Management A (RSSP-2a)

2017-10-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

Date and Time: 26 October 2017, 09:30 - 17:00

This workshop was very interesting in order to understand that the success of an academic research project relies on finding balance between academic outcomes and expectations, such as my sponsors'. Also, I learned that academic projects, unlike industry projects, give me a little bit of more freedom to decide how and why to do them.

I think that the most important impact this this workshop will have in my research in the next few months is to set manageble goals, and most importantly, how using effective communication in order to handle risk when things go wrong.

Key highlights learned from this workshop are:

What steps do you take to proactively manage your project? - Keep everybody informed - Issues:

If academic -> get sources of knowledge
If technical -> prototyping to identify why the issue is there - Keep my supervisor informed of issues to make theory and practice make sense.

Use Work Breakdown Structure (WBS):

To manage and assign budget, schedule and resources - Project -> Subproject->Main Work Package -> Package -> Task -> Action
Consider task duration to accurately forecast time/resources
When you haven't done a task before - Expert judgment -Breakdown tasks into activities -100% chance of breakdown your planning and yourself!
Educated guess - improves with experience
Seek advice
Crowd-source
Pilot
Subdivide until certain
Add slack time
Consider risk (probability and impact)
Pay attention to particular critical tasks

Paragraph construction: elements and transition (RSSP-W3)

2017-10-25T16:30:00.000-07:00

Date and Time: 25 October 2017, 12:00 - 14:00

" A person who can write a good paragraph can write more complex pieces such as sections, chapters, and even thesis."

This workshop was very useful to me in order to understand the proper way to develop a solid argument within a paragraph. As a researcher, learning to properly write paragraphs helps me to give my ideas a sense of unity, coherence, order and completeness.

I think that I've learned to avoid making paragraph construction a mechanical task which lessens the importance of arguments. It has been very difficult to me to identify a clear topic sentence in my paragraphs that enable drive the argument of my supporting sentences to make a point whilst giving closure or conclusion to my ideas.

In the next months, these writing skills will help me to communicate my research more effectively by providing strong arguments to deliver impact and engagement with my reader.

Weekly Research Group Meetings

2017-10-17T20:00:00.000-07:00

Research Group Meetings running (whenever possible) from 24/10/2017 to 26/06/2018

Weekly research group meetings (whenever possible) [with my supervisor Dr. Arshad Jhumka and my other colleagues in our research group] so we can learn about the various research being done in the group.
This meeting [has] 1/2 talks of 15/20 mins each (initially it will be about individual
research) but to also open it up to discuss ideas/new ideas/new directions etc. [Papers] that [have] been accepted for presentation at a conference [can also be discussed in] this forum for dry runs/feedback etc.

This is a focused weekly research group meetings (whenever possible) in which we share our research knowledge with our colleagues and supervisor. Some days we are expected to present our research so we can get feedback. I think this activity really help me to establish short manageable targets each week to be presented during the meeting.

I think this experience is very helpful to develop my presentation skills when speaking to a specialised audience. I find having these meetings very productive because I can receive feedback from my colleagues and my supervisor in an informal and relaxed way.

Understanding academic writing and the main types of postgraduate writing (RSSP-W1)

2017-10-12T18:00:00.000-07:00

Date and Time: 12 October 2017, 14:00 - 16:00

This seminar helped me to understand not only the academic writing style, but also the importance of considering the audience who will be reading, or interested on reading your piece of work. Whilst academic writing has a formal writing style, it does not have to be boring/tedious to the reader. In fact, making the text interesting is a crucial factor to communicate your reseach effectively.

In this workshop, we were asked about our personal struggles when writing academically. In my case, coherence and transitioning from one paragraph/section/chapter is a bit of a problem. I was advised to take another seminar abour paragraph construction which will help me to address this issue. This is very important for me since I am in the process of writing a journal article with my supervisor and we both are keen to get it right.