LASER Workshop History
LASER was conceived in 2011 by two groups of colleagues with slightly different perspectives and goals. The first group wished to develop a continuing workshop series focused on publishing results from sound research where the hypothesis was not proven true (i.e., negative results). It was and still is believed that these results are highly valuable to scientific progress, but such are seldom published and the lessons are lost. The second group wished to develop a continuing workshop series focused on the science of cybersecurity and all aspects thereof. These two groups joined efforts to form one combined workshop. Hence, LASER focuses on both of these areas of study.
The joint collaboration secured funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to host workshops during 2012-2014. A follow-on NSF grant was secured to fund workshops in the 2015-2017 time frame. In addition, the Applied Computer Security Associates (ACSA) agreed to provide banking services and upfront financial support to cover expenses prior to receipt of NSF funds. LASER received additional support from SRI International (use of facilities), the Zakon group (use of OpenConf), ICPS/ACM (2012 publications), and the Carnegie Mellon University SEI (2012 web hosting) and Computer Emergency Response Team (2014 financial sponsor). Initially, LASER was a standalone two-day workshop conducted at SRI's Arlington, VA facility. Each year, the organizing committee chose a slightly different sub-area of focus for the workshop to help the community. The 2012 workshop focused on unanticipated experiment results and utilized a mini-conference format. Workshop papers are available in the ACM Digital Library. The 2013 workshop added a focus of improving the design and execution of sound experiments and the quality of experiment reporting in papers. Workshop paper publication was moved from ACM to USENIX in order to provide free and open access to all LASER papers. In addition, sessions were video taped and archived on the LASER web site via LASER YouTube channel. The 2014 workshop focused on the science of cybersecurity and the need for good statistical methods and repeatability in experimentation. The 2016 workshop focused on experimental methodologies for improved repeatability. After the initial NSF grants concluded, it was time for LASER to become self-sustaining. To make this shift, the organizers decided to align the workshop with major cyber security research conferences. The workshop aligned with NDSS and ACSAC beginning in 2020. It is now run as a one-day workshop twice per year. Another change is that the workshop no longer puts out calls for papers. Rather, it puts out calls for participation and invites authors of select accepted papers at the aligned conference to present the details of their experiments which would otherwise not published in their conference papers due to lack of space. After the workshop, authors are invited to submit a workshop paper for publication as a companion to their conference papers. |
What's New
LASER 03/2023
will be held in conjunction with NDSS.
|