Contact

For those who are interested in the research of SPICSLab: First, please read carefully about the basis of our research topics. The current on-going projects are highly related with them. With some probation period to gain a beginer level expertise, you may be able to participate in those hands-on projects, which are usually followed by research manuscript submission (some confidential projects may not).

Accordingly, I highly recommend you to get in contact ***with substantial time left*** before the application period for probation period (internship).

If interested and you have acknowledged the above, send me an email, including the following :

1. Basic Information about yourself : Name, student number, and expected year of graduation (if you are applying as an intern), your previous job & position, and finally, a full CV+Transcript with Rank
2. Which track you are applying for : Intern, MS course, Ph.D course, or MS/Ph.D. Combined course, or else (specific track).
3. About your research background : tell us about your experience in programming, security research, or anything that may help us to understand you.
4. Which Topic (at least related field) about Security and Privacy you are interested in : As will be discussed below, you do not necessarily need to be an ‘expert’ in a field to apply – motivation matters more.

I also would like to emphasize 4 things you should consider :

1. You do not need to know everything beforehand : have some practice period with me, get to know several topics, then with some expertise, you can jump into the projects. The most important thing is motivation, attitude, and basic instincts in research. I will help you with the expertise.

2. Being a good hands-on programmer is one thing – being a good researcher is another: You should identify what you truly want between the two. Finding a good research topic and writing papers is a highly different path with working on a programming project.

3. AI is not a panacea, we need to treat it carefully: Relying on AI is a very bad habit. It is full of faults and problems which may induce sensitive issues in various aspects of your life. This is actually very good news for us, as AI safety/security topics are trending for the same reason.

4. Applied Cryptography is not about Math, you don’t need to like MATH – but you should be good programmers: This is a very common but wrong stereotype. Applied cryptography is different with crypto-theories. It’s about using them to make applications secure and private. The cryptographic APIs are codes, just as other open-sourced libraries. I myself was awful at math, and yet, my representative papers in top-tier conferences are about the next-generation cryptography.

For those who has worries but do not know what to even ask: You may also want to talk about different topics – what to do to get a good job, agonies about graduation, which field to dig in, etc. I know that it may be awkward to initiate the interaction, but please do contact me – I don’t bite, I will do as much as I can to help you out. After all, you only get to know stuff by asking and learning.