Stefano’s Research Journey
This is the story of how I went from an uninterested, socially-anxious student who was more concerned with what I was going to drink on a Wednesday night than the midterm that would be waiting for me on the morning after, to a confident, internationally published researcher who is helping make fishing more sustainable on a global scale, and also helping law enforcement understand how and why communities sense safety or danger in their surroundings. If you’re thinking this sounds too good to be true, I’m right with you – I would not believe my own story if I read it from somewhere online. That said, research helped me find what I care about in this world and has empowered me with the knowledge and skills I need to make a difference. I’ll give you some background context on my early days, and tell the story of how I accidentally stumbled upon and conquered the world of undergraduate research. By the time you’re done reading, I hope to show you that anyone can do research and why it’s worth a shot.
My early days
I was born and raised in the interior of the state of São Paulo, in Brazil. Growing up down there was awesome, and I was lucky to have a bunch of friends in the neighbourhood with whom I’d play sports all day and hang out watching movies or playing video games at night. I’m sharing below a picture of my hometown, particularly of the local rec center where my friends and I would spend countless hours enjoying the warm summer breeze.
Always asking questions
From an early age, I was extremely curious about understanding the world around me. I remember once calling my parents out to our backyard, holding a soccer ball on my hands. “Here, here, look what happens when I toss the ball up” – I said. “It stays up for a bit but then it quickly falls down”. I then grabbed a stick, and repeated my experiment: “And look how the same thing happens when I toss up this stick!”. My parents looked puzzled, and were quick to dismiss my enthusiasm. “Yes, things fall down when you throw them up. It’s called gravity”. But I was not done. I replied: “I know things fall down, that’s what I’m saying!”. “So why is it that these things fall down when they’re in the air, but an airplane – which is much heavier than my ball or this stick – manages to stay up in the air for much longer?” – I asked. That’s when my dad explained to me all there was to know about the concept of lift, and how the shape of an airplane’s wing forces air to travel at different speeds on the upper and lower surfaces, which in turn forces the airplane to stay up in the air.
I would spend the better part of my childhood chasing after my curiosity, with incrementally crazy and ambitious science fair projects that helped me understand how things work. I was privileged to be in an environment where my curiosity was valued and I had the freedom to explore the weirdest questions my mind would concoct with help from all the “grown-ups” to help me keep my focus when exploring.
Morphing into your stereotypical rebellious teenager
It wasn’t until high school that I lost touch with that curious side of myself. I ended up being accepted into the IT program at the local technical high school (ETEC Bento Quirino, for those who are curious), where I quickly learned that there are people out there who don’t care as much as others did in my earlier years. I didn’t have any of my old friends around at this new school, and I desperately wanted to fit in and be one of the cool kids. I was in touch with people with many different interests, and started wanting to spend more time goofing off and hanging out than studying for my classes. To be fair, the academic standards at that school were not very high and I managed to get by just fine by putting in the minimal amount of effort needed to get me through the school year. I did enjoy the computing-related courses though, in spite of the lack of effort of my teachers to guide us through the subject matter. This interest I discovered helped me get through University in spite of my lack of interest for the first couple of years.
How University started for me
If you are a first or second year student, you’re probably familiar with the many perks that Campus life has to offer: parties going on pretty much every day, hitting up local clubs and bars on weekends, spontaneous adventures around town, you name it. I am a fan of all those things, and honestly prioritized all of them over my academics for the first half of my university career. I was living through several loops of the classic “boy-meets-girl, it-doesn’t-work-out, boy-parties-it-up-to-forget” story, and if I’m being honest I kind of enjoyed that. It felt lyrical, almost as if I was living my college experience exactly how I had seen it in movies growing up. This meant I got involved with people who had priorities other than school in mind, and I did not care too much about my learning for the first few years I attended University.
Even while I was having the time of my life outside of class, I seemed to get through my courses just fine. The classic first-year general courses were easy enough for me to get by without too much effort, and the computing courses were basically repeats of what I had already learned in sigh school – so I actually got decent grades despite my lack of effort. Looking back, this gave me the opportunity to meet new people and enjoy life without the concern for what my future was going to be like. Eventually I realized I needed to get a job to support myself through this life of not caring about school, and that need came around the same time I moved away from campus and into a quiet neighbourhood a few minutes away.
My first contact with research
I was ready to take my essentially-blank resume up to somewhere like Walmart or McDonald’s so that I could hopefully make something happen for myself. Until this one day, when I was sitting in an Applied Artificial Intelligence course and my professor mentioned he was looking to hire some research assistants to help him with a few different research projects he had going on at the time. He told students who had decent grades and were interested come up to his office after class to have a chat in more detail. I kid you not, my thought process here was literally “the walk to this office is shorter than the walk up to Walmart, so I should probably see what he has to say”. Looking back, this is probably the first time in my life where my minimal-effort mindset came in handy.
So I went up to his office, and was surprised to find that only another student besides myself decided to look into it. We had a brief chat, where this professor briefly described the two projects we could choose from: working with a crime dataset in Vancouver, or working with Phishing – which in computing science generally refers to those scam emails you get every once in a while asking you to make a deposit in exchange for being shipped a crate of diamonds from Congo or something. In another lapse of my minimal-effort mindset, I decided to let the other student choose their preferred route and I would just pick the other. The student picked the Vancouver crime project, and I was left with the alternative. Given the lack of other students interested in this opportunity, we were hired on the spot.
After that meeting, I went home with a flash drive containing a few datasets which I was instructed to look over and see what I could do with them. I was thinking I could try to apply some artificial intelligence algorithm to these scam emails, and maybe come up with a better way to detect and report spam in your inbox. This meant I wouldn’t have to walk up to Walmart or bus up to McDonald’s every day, and also seemed like something that would probably look nice on my resume.
A Happy Little Accident
When I got home I obviously procrastinated for a few hours, but eventually I got around to plugging in the flash drive to take a look at what I had to work with. It was at this moment I realized I was in deep trouble. I started looking through the folders in this flash drive, and they only contained files with cryptic names that didn’t seem to make much sense. Once I opened a few of the datasets, I noticed there were column names like “Vessel length”, “Vessel width”, “Speed (knots)”, “Country of origin”, etc. That’s when it clicked: my professor was not talking about Phishing, he was talking about Fishing! And boy, was I disappointed. First of all, I don’t even like fish – I don’t like the texture, I don’t like the taste, and I really don’t like the smell. Second of all – why on earth would someone in Computing Science give a flying you-know-what about what boats are in the ocean? So many questions, such few answers. Regardless of how I felt about it I still had bills to pay, so I figured “screw it, I’ll take it” and kept working.
A loop of ups and downs
After playing with the fishing data for a few weeks and learning ways to visualize and analyze it, I was hitting a bit of a wall. Looking at everything I had, it seemed I could plot the trajectories, discover additional data on those vessels, and do a whole lot of stuff that didn’t really contribute much to the academic community looking at illegal fishing. I started focusing more on reading all the computing science papers I could find on this topic, and I was pretty overwhelmed when I found out that there were already hundreds – if not thousands – of PhD’s and post-docs working away at detecting illegal fishing automatically using fancy AI algorithms whose names I couldn’t even pronounce.
I’m not going to lie to you, I definitely wanted to give up here. After reading all those papers I thought that it all had finally caught up to me, and that it was clearly impossible for a college kid to contribute meaningfully to a global issue like illegal fishing. But I still needed a job, so I kept going. I brought up the fact that I wasn’t feeling super confident on the project with my research supervisor, and that’s when he told me he had somebody else working on the project for a few months previously and they also came up empty-handed. That’s when we started to brainstorm different approaches, and one of the things I thought of doing was taking a look at illegal fishing literature beyond the scope of computing science. That ended up being a really important step in really understanding the problem I was trying to help solve.
Looking at other literature related to illegal fishing, I actually found some articles estimating the financial impact caused by this type of crime and others describing in detail why it is that organized crime seems to prevail in this activity despite law enforcement’s best efforts to keep them at bay. That’s when I first read a weird little word that would come to be pretty important down the road: “Transshipment”. For context, transshipment describes the practice of fishing vessels offloading their catch onto larger, refrigerated transport vessels who take it to port. This was presented as the key to the success of organized crime in illegal fishing, so I decided to look deeper into it. I found that there were lots of other researchers looking at these events, but mostly using statistical techniques to describe the “big-picture” of this problem globally.
A drunken “eureka” moment
At this point I was immersed in the world of illegal fishing, and could recite by heart the numbers and figures that helped me get people’s attention when they asked what I did for work. I also had a gut feeling that there was something to this “transshipment” thing that the literature was missing, I just couldn’t tell what it was quite yet. Eventually my week of literature exploration was over, and Friday came around. It was a snowy mess outside, so I decided to stick around the house and just have a few drinks while watching a movie before packing it in early. As I was laying in my bed, I remembered one of the research projects my supervisor had shown us where he used public police records to create a network of criminals in the city of Vancouver. The premise was simple: people are represented as little dots on a screen. If two people are arrested together, their dots are connected by a line, and moved closer together. When you do this for arrest records over a long period of time, you basically form this super cool network of co-offenders that gives insights into different criminal groups – including organized crime.
“That’s it” – I thought. I can use the transshipment events as my way to connect the dots and see what comes out of it. I quickly jumped on Google Scholar to look for anyone who had done the same thing and I couldn’t find anything. It looks like I was the first person to think this could be useful for illegal fishing. The thing is that when you model things as a bunch of dots and their relationships as lines between those dots, you are creating an incredibly powerful and information-rich representation of reality. On the one hand you have created a graph, which is a very well-known structure in Mathematics that provides a ton of interesting algorithms and analytical techniques you could apply to your model. On the other hand, you’re creating a social network graph – a special type of graph that represents individuals and their relationships – which yields itself to the application of even more cool metrics and methodologies. I had found my path, and I was going to stick with it.
Gaining confidence and becoming recognized
I brought up this idea to my supervisor, who was completely flabbergasted that I had come up with that on my own and hadn’t found any existing literature doing the same thing. I was happy, and had a lot of learning to do before I could actually get to work creating my model. I started reading all sorts of books and papers on Social Network Analysis (my methodology of choice) and slowly figured out a plan to create what I had in mind. I eventually found the data I needed, coded a program to parse it into a network format, and found a software tool to help me visualize my network graph and conduct some analyses of my own. This first bout of effort eventually became what is my first ever published paper: “Social Network Analysis of Global Transshipment: a framework for discovering illegal fishing networks” (Park et al., 2020).
Right after finishing my first paper, I was accepted into the Undergraduate Research Experience Award Program (UREAP) at Thompson Rivers University. This funded me through an entire summer dedicated to doing research and continuing with my project, which I really enjoyed. I was starting to get good at writing papers, and I seemed to have gotten much better at solving problems creatively and quickly – my grades even went up in the following fall semester, in spite of me having less time to dedicate to studying now that I was putting in more time towards my research. I eventually finished creating a fully customized version of the visualization software I had used previously, because I wanted something that would tell me the story of how the network came to be over time – not just give me the end-product of decades of organized crime. This eventually turned into my second published paper: “Static and Dynamic Social Network Models for the Analysis of Transshipment in Illegal Fishing” (Stamato et al, 2020).
I was getting pretty good at this! I started taking on more responsibility in the research group of my supervisor, and I eventually pivoted to helping them through a few of their environmental criminology projects. I even managed to score a collaborative research project with a private criminology company in Vancouver (Stamato et al., 2021), which turned out to be my third paper to be published – and in a completely different field! After these two years of working with research, I am confident that I can have a positive impact on the world around me in whatever field I choose. I had the chance to present my work at conferences in this time as well, which really helped me push through a lot of my anxiety and learn how to embrace the nervousness when giving talks in front of so many knowledgeable scientists.
So why care about any of this, you ask?
If you’re like me, but somehow stumbled upon this story in the CURN site – I highly encourage you to give research a shot. The scientific community needs more people like us who like to enjoy what life has to offer, and who can genuinely connect with others regardless of who they are. Think of research as a way to make some money while you explore something you care about, while also learning a whole bunch of skills along the way! In a worst-case scenario you would leave the experience knowing one more thing you don’t want to do, and with a bunch of skills, you can apply in getting you closer to your own goals.
References
Park, A. J., & Stamato, S. Z. (2020). Social Network Analysis of Global Transshipment: A Framework for Discovering Illegal Fishing Networks. 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 776–783. doi:10.1109/ASONAM49781.2020.9381417
Stamato, S., & Park, A. J. (2020). Static and Dynamic Social Network Models for the Analysis of Transshipment in Illegal Fishing. 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), 2563–2568. doi:10.1109/BigData50022.2020.9378202
Stamato, S. Z., Park, A. J., Eng, B., Spicer, V., Tsang, H. H., & Rossmo, D. K. (2021). Differences in Geographic Profiles When Using Street Routing Versus Manhattan Distances in Buffer Zone Radii Calculations. 2021 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), 1–6. doi:10.1109/ISI53945.2021.9624736