Author: Leysan Nurgalieva

In July 2021, we launched an online user study on digital COVID-19 immunity
certificates in the Republic of Ireland. The study design included an
initial online screening survey with a random prize draw among those who
completed it (20 euro Amazon voucher), which attracted a bot attack with a
massive number of fraudulent survey responses threatening the integrity of
our screening survey. In this post, I describe the challenge and suggest
strategies to mitigate or even avoid it for future studies.

[3.5 MINS READ]

Ethics approval is an important and inevitable stage in any human-computer
interaction research project. The evaluation time of the ethics of our
crisis-response COVID-related research proposals was a long wait. While the
pandemic is an exceptional time with quickly changing situations that
require rapid response, in the end, it was well worth the wait and
important not only for academics but for … everyone. Why?

[2.5 MINS READ]

I work as a postdoc, but how did I come to this? How does one become a
postdoc? Here is the second part of the answer to this question; please,
see the first part here: How does one become a postdoc? My story (part 1).
Towards the end of the PhD, everyone starts thinking of “what’s next”.
There are different paths one can take after adding a Dr to their title. In
computer science, you are often asked whether you want to stay in academia
or switch to industry…

[6.5 MINS READ]