Security and Privacy of Machine Learning

Blogging Mechanics

Here are some suggestions for how to create the class blog posts for your assigned classes. I believe each team has at least a few members with enough experience using git and web contruction tools that following these instructions won’t be a big burden, but if you have other ways you want to build your blog page for a topic let me know and we can discuss alternative options.

  • Install Hugo. Hugo is a static website generator that builds a site from Markdown pages. (With homebrew on Mac OS X, this is easy: brew update && brew install hugo.)

  • Clone the github repository, https://github.com/secML/secML.github.io. This is what is used to build the https://secml.github.io/ site. If you are working with multiple teammates on the blog post (which you probably should be), you can add write permissions for everyone to the cloned repository.

  • You should create your page in the web/content/post/ subdirectory. You can start by copying an earlier file in that directory (e.g., class1.md) and updating the header section (between the +++ marks) and replacing everything after that with your content. Don’t forget to update the date so your page will appear in the right order. You can put draft = true in the header, so your page will not appear on the course website until it is ready.

  • You can use multiple files (but probably only one in the post/ directory (this will show up as pages on the front list). Use the web/content/images directory for images and the web/content/docs directory for papers. Using images and other resources to make your post interesting and visually compelling is highly encouraged!

  • Write the blog page using Markdown. Markdown is a simple markup language that can be used to easily generate both HTML and other output document formats. You can probably figure out everything you need by looking at previous posts, but for a summary of Markdown, see Markdown: Syntax.

  • You can incorporate latex math into your markdown. Use \\( inline \\) for inline math, e.g., \\( J_{min}\\} and $$ ... $$ for display math.

  • Your post should include credits for any external material you use, especially for any images you incorporate that you didn’t produce.

  • Please include full references to the papers, and links to the most definitive source available (usually this is to arxiv or a conference site, but could be the author’s page). You should include additional links to relevant and useful reference or code repositories. Its good to have an overview section at the beginning of the post with links to all the main papers covered, and then to have links in specific sections to what is being covered.

  • To test the post, run make develop (in the web/ subdirectory of your repository). This starts the Hugo development server, usually on port 1313 (unless that port is already in use). Then, you can view the site with a browser at localhost:1313.

  • When you are ready, submit a pull request to incorporate your changes into the main repository (and public course website). Also, send a message to me (dave) on slack, so I know the post is ready to review. At this stage, I will probably make some requests for improvements, and then will post the edited version to the course site.