Category: G54SUM

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Participating in a doctoral symposium online

post by Kadja Manninen (2018 Cohort)

As we all know, the current pandemic has banned mass gatherings for the foreseeable future. This has meant cancelling academic conferences or trying to deliver them online. When submitting for The British Academy of Management (BAM) conference in February 2020, I was looking forward to an exciting trip to Manchester involving lots of networking with fellow PhD researchers and more established academics. But, as it happens, the virus is still spreading amongst us, and instead of a nice Manchester-stay and sophisticated conversations over fancy conference meals, I was stuck in my study in front of a computer screen for four full days, detaching myself from my laptop only to grab a quick bite to eat.  

The postponement of the live conference until 2021 was initially somewhat of a disappointment. But when the time arrived, however, (and perhaps motivated by the long-lagging six weeks of school holidays), I was, in fact, quite excited to usher my child back to school and start engaging with the online event. I was hoping that the symposium could offer me an opportunity to meet other early career researchers specialised in entrepreneurship and/or cultural and creative industries, and also, as my professional background is in event management, I was keen to see how an event that traditionally takes place in a live setting can be adapted into an online environment.  

For those of you who are not familiar with BAM (founded 1986), they are the leading authority on the academic field of management in the UK, with a mission of supporting and representing scholars, as well as engaging with the international business and management community. BAM has over 2000 members, out of whom 25% are located outside the UK, and 30% are PhD students. They publish two academic journals; the British Journal of Management and the European Journal of Management Research, and every year they organise the BAM conference, which usually gathers around 900 delegates worldwide.

This blog post is about the doctoral symposium, which kicked off the conference week with a one-day event and was followed by the three-day main conference. I have two focuses with this post. First, I will highlight some key moments from the symposium, which I hope can be useful for other postgraduate researchers. Second, I will discuss the online conference experience from a participant’s as well as an event manager’s perspective.  

Symposium highlights 

The BAM Doctoral Symposium brought together over 160 participants from all over the world for a full day of Zoom sessions aimed at postgraduate researchers. In the welcome speech the organisers stressed that thanks to the online delivery of the event, the event had attracted more international participants than in the previous years. This was most likely due to the online conference format being significantly more affordable with a lower conference fee and lack of travel costs. The symposium was fully conducted on Zoom, and the programme was split into sessions aimed at both early and later stage PhD students, meaning that we could decide ourselves which sessions were the best suited for our needs.  

The first highlight of the day was a session aimed at early-stage PhD students, entitled “Conducting a literature review” and led by Prof David Denyer & Dr Colin Pilbeam. Although I’m already starting the 3rd year of my PhD, I have recently been revising my literature review (a never-ending task, I guess…), and therefore decided to join this session. The presenters began by stressing that it’s fundamental to get the literature review right, as otherwise is very hard to justify the research question. Next, they moved on to discuss, among other things, the common traps PhD students fall into when writing a literature review. Out of the seven traps, I found that “the broad and unfocused review question” trap resonated strongly with me. I couldn’t help thinking back to the numerous hours I’ve spent reformulating my review questions in the past year. Below is a useful example of a question that lacks focus and needs narrowing down.  

What was particularly good about this session, however, was the presenters’ use of the recently launched Mentimeter software, which enabled them to conduct live polls during the session. Mentimeter has also a free plan that is suitable, for example, for students, and even some of the premium plans are quite affordable. I’m definitely on trying it out with my next online presentation.  

The second highlight of the symposium relates to the perhaps most dreaded question amongst PhD students. I guess each of us is at least once during the PhD journey faced with the question “What is your contribution to theory?” In fact, this happened to me already in my first annual review, and hoping to provide a better answer next time, I signed up for Professor Ashley Braganza’s session entitled “Exploring Theory as a Lens for Research”.  

Professor Braganza began his presentation by underlining the relevance of the unit of analysis to doctoral studies. To be honest, I had never asked myself what the unit of analysis in my research was, but I do agree that the question seems highly pertinent and can guide you in the right direction when selecting your theoretical framework. 

In addition, he argued that when selecting a theory or theories, you should not go over three theories, but try using a maximum of one or two theories, and the rest can go under the research context. This was somewhat comforting to me, as it is a topic that I have struggled with over the summer while revising my literature review and trying to locate my conceptual home in the broad array of multidisciplinary literature. Again, I think that having too many theories to choose from is very likely to be a common issue for interdisciplinary researchers.  

The final highlight of my symposium day was a paper presentation session, where selected PhD students were presenting their research, and were offered a chance to receive some feedback from the audience as well as a senior academic. I decided to watch two presentations in the entrepreneurship track, focusing on female and family entrepreneurship. It was very inspiring to hear of fellow PhD students’ work, and compare their journey to my own. I didn’t submit a paper to the doctoral symposium, as our developmental paper had been accepted for the main conference, and I found that being in the middle of my second phase of data collection wasn’t probably the best time to present findings from my research. I did end up regretting my decision though, and blaming my perfectionism for it, as in fact, it would have been totally fine to present some initial findings from my research. Nevertheless, it was reassuring to realise that others’ papers were nowhere near to be finished or polished pieces of writing. I guess the main advice I can give to other PhD students is that you shouldn’t hesitate to submit to doctoral symposiums, even if your work is still far from perfect. Luckily, I will still have a chance to do so next year.  

The online experience 

From a technological perspective, everything worked smoothly, and Zoom proved to be an adequate platform for hosting over 160 people for a one-day event. The larger sessions were conducted on Zoom webinar mode, meaning that cameras are only on for the speakers, while everyone else was muted and could asks question in the Q&A section. During the smaller sessions, we were able to have our cameras on and join the conversation if we wished to do so. However, Zoom is not a conference platform as such. This meant that every session had a different URL, and you had to constantly navigate between the PDF programme, where the video call links were, and the actual Zoom app. As I was also taking notes, and occasionally tweeting, the whole experience was quite laborious as it involved continuous switching from one browser page onto another depending on what I wanted to do. I do hope this pandemic and the increased demand for all-in-one virtual conference platforms will motivate companies to develop more user-friendly platforms that can handle large numbers of participants, as I haven’t yet been lucky enough to come across one.  

To sum it up, a virtual conference simply cannot compete with the real thing – at least not yet. However, until technology develops enough to provide a smoother experience, it remains the best option we have for maintaining at least some aspects of normality. That said, the main difference between the online and live conference formats was undoubtedly the lack of ad hoc networking opportunities, those random conversations that in real life might take place during a coffee break, or over a conference meal. For instance, we were able to ask questions during presentations on the Zoom Q&A section, but there were no real opportunities to engage in a conversation with fellow PhD candidates.

It is evident that spontaneous digital engagement between people who have never met each other is extremely difficult to achieve in a virtual setting, as it doesn’t occur naturally or without encouragement. However, I do realise that this is only the beginning of what might be an era of virtual events, and the technology for conducting this type of events is developing at a rapid pace. I think that it’s important also that event organisers take the risk of experimenting with different software and try out new ways of structuring their events. For example, and perhaps because of time restrictions, this event didn’t have any time allocated for networking, meaning that 160 participants didn’t have a real opportunity to meet each other. This was not the case during the actual BAM conference, where plenty of time was allocated to networking in custom-made virtual coffee rooms, but as it was not compulsory or moderated, only a handful of delegates made the effort of engaging with others.  

From the virtual doctoral symposium experience, I think the main takeaway is that it sparked my appetite for the BAM live conference and introduced me to a like-minded, extremely inclusive research community. As my research basically sits in between arts and business, I remember that last year after participating in the Audience Research in the Arts conference, I did end up feeling a bit like an interdisciplinary alien. That’s why I’m happy to say that with the BAM conference this year I didn’t feel like that at all, on the contrary, I felt like the business and management community was (virtually) embracing me quite warmly. My fingers are tightly crossed in the hope that in 2021, I can take part in the doctoral symposium and BAM conference in person and I’ll promise to be very grateful for every little opportunity for small talk or any form of live conversation. 

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Small visit to Big Dat – winter school conference in Ancona

Post by Vanja Ljevar (2017 Cohort) reflecting on her experience at BigDat2020

Big Dat was an international data science winter school that gathered many influential data scientists (currently working in industry), but also a vast number of postgraduate students, lecturers and other data science enthusiasts. This winter school was organised by Politecnico Italia, in Ancona, and lasted for 5 days, during which there were interactive workshops and talks given by international speakers. The concept was: we had an option to chose which morning lectures we were interested in attending; the morning lectures were concluded by a lunch where we had a chance to socialise with other equally minded data scientists. In the evenings we had arranged meetings with other participants for socializing, dining (and even dancing!).

One of the benefits of participating in this winter school was exploring Ancona during our free time. Being a very atypical Italian city, it is a well-kept secret, away from other touristy-crowded Italian attractions. However, this city of barely 100.000 people has a very rich history, maintained through old churches, small Venice-like streets (but no channels) and markets.

  • City Centre of Ancona

Our hotel was located next to a breath-taking monument – Il Passetto. This is an example of fascist architecture, commemorating the second world-war victims.

Apart from Ancona’s beautiful sights, some of the most relevant highlights of this winter school proved to be interesting ideas and concepts that can inspire data scientists to produce more effective, more creative and more ground breaking work. Bellow are only some of the examples.

The power of handwriting

Dr Charles Elkan, from the University in Califonia gave an incredible introductory lecture on deep learning. This lecture was focused on maths behind the concept and shed a new light on backpropagation, name entity recognition and co-reference resolution. However, the highlight of the presentation was the use of PowerPoint slides, in a way I have never seen before. Instead of creating a standard set of slides, Dr Elkan put on a screen his hand-written pages. After going though several (already) written slides, he wrote mathematical formulas in real time and we could see them on the screen. This provided the sense of a more personal, even face-to-face teaching environment, which we used to have with teachers in primary schools. This meant that we could all approach this largely popular, but also inaccessible (and may I add scary) field – from scratch (literally!) and with a more comforting and nurturing approach.

Occan’s razor

Another amazing set of lectures was given on the topic of Process Mining. Process Mining was more business – focused lecture about the family of techniques that support the analysis of business processes based on event logs. Presented as a highly relevant field of research, process mining was introduced though its four main characteristics: generalisation, precision, fitness and simplicity. The explanation about why simplicity is extremely important for process mining, the speaker mentioned the Occan’s razor – the problem-solving principle that states: when presented with competing hypothesis that make the same prediction, one should select the solution with fewer assumptions. The reason why Occan’s razor theory is particularly interesting is because it reflects the fact that this winter school was not only focused on delivering new knowledge about the latest progress in the filed, it also enabled us to share underlying theories and ideas that any data scientist and developer should have in mind during research. To further illustrate similar concept explained in the light of process mining, there was also a mention of the ‘conformance checking’. This is another concept that saves us from the bias of ‘unfairness’. To illustrate, if we ask who is the doctor who killed the most patients, it is highly likely to be the most experienced one (simply because they had seen the most patients!). Process mining takes into account such biases, which makes it fair and efficient.

How to produce nice graphs Be a detective

We walked into this lecture knowing one power of data visualisation: to communicate results in a more engaging and interesting way. Everyone likes nice graphs and we are always in search of new and more powerful softwares that will enable us to create them. However, this lecture was not about pretty graphs, it was about the true power of data visualisation – story telling and detective work. We learned presenting data visually is relevant not only because sometimes there are statistics that are the same, but their underlying data is different. Data visualisation is also a sort of detective work, aimed at creating work that presents several parts combined to respond to questions such are: who, when, what, where. The ultimate goal is finding a response to questions like why and how. To illustrate, the presenter gave us a story about John Snow and 1800’s London during the outbreak of cholera. Even though doctors and scientists believed it was the bad air that was responsible for cholera, John Snow decided to visually present the map of cholera cases in Soho, in 1813. Based on this visual representation of cases, John Snow was able to respond to a very important question – what do all these cases have in common? It turned out that all these patients retrieved water from the local street pump. After removing the pump’s handle John Snow effectively stopped the outbreak and unknowingly unlocked the power of data visualisation that today exists at every data scientists reach.

Summary

Overall, BigDat 2020 was addressed to students, researchers and practitioners who want to keep themselves updated about recent developments and future trends. It was a memorable research training event, with a global scope, aiming at investigating advances in the critical and fast developing area of big data, but also society itself. This was of particular relevance to my PhD as I got a chance to learn more about Natural Language processing, Deep Learning and speak to the leading experts from the field.  In fact, interaction was the main component of the event, reminding us all that we are always in a continuous pursue of knowledge, regardless of whether we are industry practitioners, renowned academics, industry pioneers or merely a 3rd year CDT students.

5 out of 5 stars!

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Returning from BigDat2020

post by Maddy Ellis (2016 cohort)
reflecting on her experience at BigDat2020

BigDat 2020

6th International Winter School on BigDat
Department of Information Engineering
Marche Polytechnic University 
Ancona, Italy – January 13-17, 2020

Big Data in a growing field with ties into a number of academic tracks. The variety of sources, applications of Big Data create a large spectrum of challenges and advances which have potential for huge impact on scientific discoveries in business models, society, medicine and numerous other fields. BigDat2020 brought together researchers, academics and industry pioneers to facilitate learning, collaborations and idea sharing. 

During the winter school seminars and lectures were put on in a number of areas such as, major challenges of analytics, infrastructure, management, search and mining, security, privacy and applications. Alongside these courses from a number of inspiring speakers, the event also hosted daily lunches and breaks which motivated active and promising interactions from research students. Below are some reflections of my experience at BigDat2020. 

18th Century Insights into
21st Century Problems

During the winter school Rory Smith (Monash University) ran a series of lectures on ‘Learning from Data, the Bayesian Way’. The goal of these lectures was to take a Bayesian look at statistically optimal ways to detect and extract information in noisy data. This lecture series addressed a range of Bayesian related topics from inference and parameter estimation to sampling methods and hierarchical inference. Coming from a pure mathematics degree these lectures appealed to me the moment I saw them in the schedule. An early slide in the course read “18th Century Insights into 21st Century Problems”. This really resonated with me. My PhD is an interesting hybrid between the application of mathematics into modern issues such as poverty and development. Often in my literature review I have come across papers from over 100 years ago and yet the mathematics not only still hold but is fundamentally routed and often unchanged in work done today. There is something beautiful about this. It’s like visiting an old cathedral and admiring the strength of large pillars which have stayed standing through years of weathering and generations of visitors. 

Bayesian methodology is a statistical tool introduced by Rev.Thomas Bayes in the 18th century, yet it is vital in providing solutions to a variety of statistical issues and problems presented by researchers today. It’s incredible! Bayes approach can be used to compliment a range of statistical methods and I would recommend researchers from any field look into learning some basic Bayesian statistics to see where they could be used in their work.

Accessibility

Another thing which stood out to me at this event was accessibility. Big data is such a broad topic and is applied in so many fields now that scoping an event tailored to all these fields is inevitably difficult. People attending this conference ranged from pure data scientists and statisticians with intricate knowledge of a range of big data areas, to people from humanity schools looking to learn what big data is to apply it to their work. Knowing this I was pleased to see that the schedule of the events include a vast range of understanding requirements for different talks. Everyone was able to pick talks which suited their needs. Many of the talks though-out the week were however given as a follow on to previous talks in the week on the same topic. The meant that there were some big leaps within and in between talks. You could sit in an hour long talk and spend the first 20 mins feeling like you were not learning anything, then be totally lost by the last 20 mins. I think this is an inevitable part of interdisciplinary work, there will be moments when you feel things are too basic and moments of overwhelming confusion. This can really feed into impostor syndrome. What I did like about this event is that there were ample resources online provided after each talk which pointed people in the right direction both for learning the basics and extending topics to more complex levels. PhD can be very isolated, you work on a tiny specific area of what you do, and often you are the only one doing it. Sometimes you might read a paper or article which leaves you totally baffled and not even knowing where to look up the information you would need to understand what the paper was talking about. Events like this help to combat these issues of accessibility and impostor syndrome – they unite people and present an opportunity for experiences to be shared and questions to be asked.

My presentation

During Big Dat I presented a summary of my recent work. One thing I talked about during my presentation was data cleaning. After this presentation someone approached me and explained that they had experienced similar ‘messy data’ issues in a completely different dataset and field of study. This sparked a really interesting conversation about the challenges we have both faced and led to us both going away with various notes on our phone of ‘Things to look into’. Without the opportunity to present this conversation would never have happened. If I could speak to my younger self of future researchers starting on the PhD journey I would encourage them to take every possible opportunity to present their work. Not only will the practice build their confidence presenting and spark useful feedback and discussions but they will also get to know their work better and be pushed to clarify aspects of work.

It’s a boy thing…

Another reflect I had of this week is an ongoing reflection throughout my educational experience. I did my undergraduate degree in mathematics. Many of my lectures, seminars and tutorials showed disproportionally many boys compared to girls. This was also reflected in the teaching staff on the course. At the time I remember questioning it and thinking why is it like this? At what age does this separation start? Who’s responsibility is it to engage young women in the field? Sitting in my first talk at Big Data I was brought right back to all those questions. I picked the more technical of the two morning sessions and in a room of nearly 100 people I could only spot about 5-6 girls. Although not as extreme, the rest of the event also had notably more boys in attendance than girls. The gender gap in the professional world is closing, albeit slowly. However the data science and more broadly tech industry are still lagging behind despite being considered a modern field of work. Problem in the work force such as pay gaps, marginalisation and discrimination are not born in the work place, they grow throughout our education. I am lucky enough to be a part of a number of different projects involving young people. After coming back from this event I am inspired to talk to these children (both boys and girls) about the wonderful world and opportunities in STEM. 

There are big questions around this. What causes these problems? And more importantly, what can people along the education path, and working in the data science industry do to solve it and be more inclusive. It could take a lifetime to answer these questions, but I want to take these thoughts with me in my career. Whatever I end up doing I want to use my research (PhD and beyond) to show young people just one of the many incredible uses of STEM knowledge.

Gratitude

This is the final year of my PhD… the famously dreaded write up year. I am certain there will be points when I wonder “Why did I do this?” “Can I do this?” “Will it all be okay?” I know I will get wrapped up in various bubbles of stress and panic. 

Fact…. It’s gonna be tough! 

That being said, I am currently writing about the reflection of an academic event I attended in Italy. An event where I learnt all sorts of things about statistics, data visualisations and problems of privacy in big data among other things. An event which led me to meet all sorts of fascinating people at various points in their career researching a range of things from road safety to spread of disease. An event which allowed me to see Ancona, a city founded by Greek settlers and today one of the main ports on the Adriatic Sea with a colleague and close friend. An event where I had the opportunity to present my work and get feedback from knowledgeable experts allowing me to improve my work. How wonderful right?! 

This is just one of the many things which had happened to me because I became a PhD candidate. My approach to getting through this year is to pop my stressful bubbles with gratitude. Before writing this Big Data reflection I wrote a list of things which I am grateful for through my PhD. Random items from this list are now scheduled to pop up at various points from now until my completion date, giving me some much needed perspective. No matter how stressful I find this year, it’s a privileged stress to have and I intend to appreciate as much of it as possible. Here are just a few examples of things I am grateful for. 

Coding – Early on in my PhD my supervisor encouraged me to take the time to make friends with Python. I couldn’t have even considered the opportunities and doors this skill will open before I started. 

Mathematics for Development Bridge – However nerdy and cheesy its sounds I love maths and I love helping people. This PhD has shown me that there is a place for both. I can be a part of work with real impact without giving up my love of mathematics.

People – Where to start with this one? The range of wonderful people I have met through this PhD is incredible! I’ve met inspiring people who are doing incredible work, like-minded people, people from totally different lives and fields to me and, people who have become lifelong friends.

These are just three of a long list, but there is so much more; seeing the world, personal growth and awareness among other things. For any fellow PhD students in their final year… we got this! 

Key Take Aways

Maths is timeless and beautiful! (And have a look at Bayesian Statistics) 

Scoping large interdisciplinary events is hard, but worth it! 

There is more to be done in terms of gender equality, and I want to prioritise this in my own career. I wanted to do this PhD – and my gosh am I grateful for the opportunities it has given me! 

 -originally posted on Maddy’s website 

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Summer School on The Human Aspects of Cyber-crime and Online Fraud

post by Neeshé Khan (2018 cohort)

This Summer School and workshop was hosted by the Kent Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Cyber Security (KirCCS) and School of Computing at the University Kent, the Institute of Applied Economics and Social Value at De Montfort University and International Association for Research in Economic Psychology (IAREP). It took place at Canterbury between 15th to the 17th of July lead by Dr Jason RC Nurse.

As I’m working on accidental insider threat within cybersecurity to examine human factors that trigger this threat, I was keen to attend this event as it would provide an overview of the issues around social engineering and associated forms of crime in the virtual and physical world – broadly sitting within my own research interests. Recent media has highlighted many cases where fraud and cybercrime have resulted from a mixture of social engineering and human vulnerabilities to gain undesirable outcomes including encryption of data to hold at ransom on an organisational and individual level. Whilst there is literature on cyber-psychology linking to malicious insiders and cybercriminals, there is little literature available that takes an interdisciplinary approach to tackle this problem, especially examining this from a psychological, economics, and cybercrime perspective. So the aim of the summer school was to introduce these disciplines and their relevance to be able to better understand this challenge. This was particularly important to me as I believe that all the global challenges being faced by the world today require collective interdisciplinary action to resolve them.

One of the highlights of attending this school was meeting a diverse range of about 40 attendees, which included different career stages within academia, people from industry, diversity in research being pursued and interests as well as diversity in ethnicity, age and academic backgrounds. Whilst most of the projects weren’t similar, it was still cohesive in terms of disciplines and understanding of cybersecurity. This allowed a space where I shared and received ideas and insights about this issue over workshop discussions and group dinners. Presentations were a mixture of academics from various universities including the University of Bristol and the University of Cambridge as well as law enforcement. I hope my notes below are of interest to anyone from psychology, economics, and cybersecurity fields taking an interdisciplinary approach to exploring cybercriminal and victim behaviour and traits, especially those involving malicious or intentional insiders.

Discussions included how the definition of cybercrime is hard to settle on as it means many different things for researchers, businesses, and individual users. Technology evolving has meant that many of the devices aren’t seen to be within the remit of cybercrime by the general public, for example, cybercrimes that happen through mobile phones or smart wearable devices are seen to be separate from the same crimes that occur through a desktop or a laptop. A way of looking at cybercrime is by categorising attacks that are ‘computer dependent’ (DoD, ransomware, etc) and those that are ‘computer-enabled’ (online fraud, phishing, etc). This can also be categorised through Crime in Technology, Crime against Technology, and Crime through Technology.

Cybercrime is a big challenge being faced by society and whilst there are numerous different types of cybercrimes, currently, popular ones include social engineering, online harassment, identity-related, hacking, and denial of service (DoS) and/or information. Social engineering and phishing attacks are the biggest attacks that are currently taking place. Cybercriminals are getting better at replicating official documents (less spelling mistakes, logos, branding, etc) and use a mixture of techniques that include misdirection and pressurising recipients to take action. Most classifications of cybercriminals are through using early techniques developed by the FBI’s human behaviour department and include the Dark Triad and OCEAN personality traits. Techniques used to investigate crimes in real life such as ‘method of operation’ (MO) and copycats seem to transfer relevantly well to cybercrime investigations.

Law enforcement believes that in their experience there is a strong link between gender, age, and mental ability and cybercriminals. Children test out their coding skills from lessons in schools to attack websites or online gaming platforms. There also appeared to be a strong link between online gaming habits, mental disorders such as ADHD and hacking. Whilst there are more cybercrimes reported to the police than crimes in the physical world, the task force is still suited for ‘boots on the ground’ than cybercrime. All individual reports of cybercrime are done through Action Fraud and involved cybercrimes that came from someone they knew such as disgruntled ex-partners. Threats included a wide spectrum but the most popular ones included fraud, abuse, blackmail, harassment, and defamation of character.

In psychology, cybercriminals are classified in similar ways to that of criminal profiling in real-world crimes. There is also interest in exploring victim traits since individuals who are a victim to an online attack are likely to be a victim to another attack in the future. When looking at cybercriminal profiling psychological and emotional states are key factors. Various online forums are researched to create a cybercriminal’s profile mainly through the following categorization: language used, attitudes towards work (for example in the case of a malicious insider threat), family characteristics, criminal history, aggressiveness, and social skill problems including integrity and historical background. However, this is challenging as personality traits and characteristics are easier to change online especially for narcissistic personality traits. However there is never a 100% certainty of creating a psychological profile of a cybercriminal, with very little research and involves stereotypical profiles such as ‘white, male, geek, like maths, spends a lot of time alone, plays online games, anti-social traits, etc. Often personality traits associated with ‘openness’ of individuals links to individuals being susceptible online to phishing and other scams.

Most important models of profiling are ‘inductive’ and ‘deductive’ criminal profiling. Inductive is using existing data to identify patterns and deductive is starting from the evidence and building up to the profile (deductive cybercriminal profile model). Deductive method is very popular and is designed by Nykodym et al 2005 but there’s also geographical profiling (Canter and Hammond 2003) that is starting to become more popular as a result of social engineering attacks. Economists are applying ‘willingness to pay’ (WTP) and ‘willingness to accept’ (WTA) models and game theory to ransomware attacks.

Overall, the summer school provided a great platform to create a new network, reaffirmed my understanding of the current approaches being adopted, offered insights to some of the research being conducted, and provided a platform to promote my research.