What is currently being studied in science?

To those who received a PhD in Computer Science and study one of its theories, what fascinates you most about what you currently study or have studied in the past?

• For example, theory of complexity, etc..

• Answer:

  When I started my PhD, I was interested in information security and distributed computing. What fascinated me about information security: how can we have architecture for defending cyber infrastructure and measure effectiveness of systems against attacks. 1. We set off on measuring the effectiveness of Intrusion Detection Systems. We were disappointed that intrusion detection/prevention systems did not adhere to a common format; where Security By Design was desired, it was Security By Obscurity. Made sense, from a commercial standpoint. But, its a huge challenge to get, parse data and measure them for a Grad student. 2. Next was email security: the idea was to design a mechanism to compute email reputation: given already parsed data. I had: date, sender IP, sender email ID, receiver IP, receiver email ID, spam(y/n). Neither did I get any other information such as email body, headers nor information about emails that were being sent. I only had the above information from info about emails received at an organization. This was made it easy to get a lot of data points (and has led me to my graduation). 3. I looked at other projects: threshold cryptography etc. 4. Analyzing large botnet logs using Hadoop and Hive to see what the churn rates etc are. 5. One of the most interesting projects I worked on was distributed computing: a project close to version vectors: hash histories. Read http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_vector. I learn a lot about distributed computing practice through that experience; though there was no paper eventually. The point is: having worked on varied projects during PhD (6-10 ideas, some of which resulted in publications; unfortunately, others didnot no matter how good the topic) had distributed the risk of any one topic turning out a dud. It also helped me gain a broader perspective about Computer Science. Another point I learned is that: forming an idea, gathering data, proving/disproving the hypothesis are *the* most important part of a PHD. Just building architectures does not suffice, there has to be a measure of what you did: whether its good or bad.