I recently wrote a paper for a conference that ended up being rejected, with a split review (2 for, 1 against). As a non-academic that wrote a paper for the first time, I'll say that writing a good science paper takes an absurd amount of time, even on a topic you are very well versed in. It is also way different than other forms of writing, like blogs or technical documentation. Frankly, I'm astounded I've even manag…
Congratulations on getting that far! There's a story there – how did you get into writing this paper? What is it about?
So I've worked in my spare time for the past three years on an extremely esoteric and mind-bending reverse engineering technique I call delinking [1] and my tool for it [2] developed a small user-base. At some point I saw in a Discord server a call for papers for the SURE workshop, shitposted that it'd be funny to fry academic brains for a change, then got baited into writing it.
What started out as a long paper (12 pages) with quantitative case studies quickly got cut down to the bone and then some into a short paper (6 pages) that merely introduced my take on it and two qualitative case reports, because I realized it would take an amount of work on the scale of a master's thesis to do the long one. I barely managed to get that out of the door as my usual writing style is extremely unsuited for scientific papers (it took all the might of Gemini and Copilot to even wring out something that vaguely resembles academic vernacular from my first draft). I've submitted it, exhausted and deeply unsatisfied by the compromises I've had to do under that severe time crunch.
Then one month later, the reviews came in. The feedback was that the topic and my take on it were interesting; the criticisms can be summarized by saying that I've missed existing related work and it would've taken the long paper to address all the deficiencies in my paper. Fair I guess, but I definitely don't have that kind of spare time to spare on writing papers.
But alongside the notification decision, something unexpected was also sent: an invitation by the program committee to present a poster at the ACM CCS 2025 conference in Taiwan. This is the kind of world-class conference with a $1800 entry ticket, happening in a convention center whose area is measured in hectares, attended by professional members of an academic, industrial or state organization, all expenses paid in a five star hotel room with a king bed.
Somehow, a hobbyist who can charitably be described as a Doctor Frankenstein but with bits instead of gibs, who creates unholy chimeras of programs in his free time in spite of ABIs and common sense, received an invitation from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry equivalent of the cyber-security academic world to present a poster. I can't even begin to express how utterly impossible this is.
So of course I said yes and now I'm in a mad dash to get everything ready in time for the conference, three weeks from now. Bonus point: it's on the other side of the planet and in my entire adult life I've basically never got farther away than the next county (and groaning while doing so). There's even more to that story, but I'll leave it for a blog post once it's done.
[1] Others call it unlinking, binary splitting or binary reassembly.