Archive for Conferences

First Day @ TOSS & FSOSS, Toronto

The first day of the Teaching Open Source Summit (TOSS) was great. I tried catching up with what other folks at the Free Software and Open Source (FSOSS) symposium were doing, but it was not what I thought it would be. Really, I had earlier thought I would be able to do both.  But I missed out on a couple of interesting workshops at the FSOSS.  However, TOSS was awesome. I met with great people – Greg from Red Hat, Frank from Mozilla, Karlie from Webpath, Mel, Dave, Fardad and Chris from Seneca, to mention a few.

There were a lot discussions on what has been happening in teaching open source around the globe. In addition, how Mozilla and Red Hat, as Open Source Software Companies, have been promoting Open Source Education was also discussed. At the end, we came up with a list of what we would like to have in TOS.

The Needs in TeachingOpenSource

The Needs in TeachingOpenSource

No doubt, it was a great experience. For once, I could see the difference between a College/Polytechnic/Univ. of Technology and the conventional academia. And now, I am asking myself some questions – Where do I belong?, Where do I want to be?, Can I find a linkage between the two? I will be brainstorming on these questions in the next few days or weeks. For now,  I look forward to another great day today – FSOSS Presentations.

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ICCCN rejects my paper for publication

The paper was titled “Converged Services in the Web-browsing Context” and was submitted to ICCCN 2009 Track on Internet Services, Systems and Applications (ISSA).ICCCN stands for International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks. With no hard feelings, I accepted the reviewers’ comments. In the academic world, we don’t expect our papers (ideas) to always be accepted. I am glad the ideas seem feasible though.

Below are the reviewers’ comments
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======= TPC Review 1 =======

> *** Recommendation: Your overall rating.
Likely Reject   (top 50% but not in top 35%, needs more work) (2)

> *** Contributions: What are the major issues addressed in the paper? Do you
consider them important? Comment on the degree of novelty, creativity, impact, and
technical depth in the paper.

An architecture for shared web browsing.

> *** Strengths: What are the major reasons to accept the paper? [Be brief.]

The studied topic is important. The proposed architecture gives some nice ideas on
how to design shared browsing services.

> *** Weakness: What are the most important reasons NOT to accept the paper? [Be
brief.]

An implementation is needed to assess the benefits of the architecture

> *** Detailed Comments: Please provide detailed comments that will be helpful to
the TPC for assessing the paper. Also provide feedback to the authors.

The ideas presented in the paper are nicely presented and show a lot of promise.
However, the benefits of the design are not easily concluded from the paper. In
addition, an implementation is necessary for the reader to assess the benefits of he
proposed ideas. The authors need to motivate their design choices.

======= TPC Review 2 =======

> *** Recommendation: Your overall rating.
Likely Reject   (top 50% but not in top 35%, needs more work) (2)

> *** Contributions: What are the major issues addressed in the paper? Do you
consider them important? Comment on the degree of novelty, creativity, impact, and
technical depth in the paper.

The paper looks at converged services looking at allowing traveling web connections.

> *** Strengths: What are the major reasons to accept the paper? [Be brief.]

The paper describes the technical details of the approach in reasonable detail with
regards to most of the underlying messages.

> *** Weakness: What are the most important reasons NOT to accept the paper? [Be
brief.]

The paper does not really have any sort of performance results and is difficult to
follow.  One would have a difficult time reproducing the results despite the paper
being well under the page limit.

> *** Detailed Comments: Please provide detailed comments that will be helpful to
the TPC for assessing the paper. Also provide feedback to the authors.

Intriguing paper with regards to converging web services across multiple devices.
While the topic is interesting, the paper itself is not especially clear.  The paper
needs to do a better job of cleanly delineating where the contribution of the work
is and placing the overall work in the proper context.

Critically, the work falls short in that several details are left quite vague.
While one could focus on just the mechanism, the paper does not really go into much
detail of Section VI, the implementation.  It has a few cursory details which seems
to consist of tada, we did it.  Beyond the earlier discussion, this is what is
interesting to the reviewer.

Were there implementation details that were tricky?  Were there lessons learned that
others could draw upon?  Is the code freely available for download? Are there any
performance results for the work, even just simply demonstrating that it indeed does
work (latency of switching off, etc.)?

As there is plenty of space left over, the authors should take full advantage of the
space to clearly show their work and what they have accomplished.  As it stands now,
there is still a fair amount of work for someone trying to build on their work to
continue forward.

======= TPC Review 3 =======

> *** Recommendation: Your overall rating.
Likely Reject   (top 50% but not in top 35%, needs more work) (2)

> *** Contributions: What are the major issues addressed in the paper? Do you
consider them important? Comment on the degree of novelty, creativity, impact, and
technical depth in the paper.

This paper proposes an implementation plan of internet-based telecommunication-style
communication services including content sharing and session handoff. As documents
of 3GPP adn 3GPP2 show, such features will be important in future web-based
communication services. The service abstracts are presented by event sequence
diagrams and associated explnations.

> *** Strengths: What are the major reasons to accept the paper? [Be brief.]

If implemented, it seems to provide a reference system upon which many research
projects could be performed including the issues of content sharing and session
handoff.

> *** Weakness: What are the most important reasons NOT to accept the paper? [Be
brief.]

The implementation plan alone, as presented in htis paper, cannot be a research
paper at major conferences. Experiences with an implementation and deployment may be
necessary to consider this paper for a conference.

> *** Detailed Comments: Please provide detailed comments that will be helpful to
the TPC for assessing the paper. Also provide feedback to the authors.

An analysis report addressing the performance of such a system would make this paper
much stronger. Or, a report of possible implementation problems would help too.

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The IEEE WCNC 2009 in Budapest, Hungary

Attending IEEE WCNC 2009 was a great experience. The conference, which took place on April 5-8, 2009, was held in Budapest, Hungary. I met  with top PG students (Ph.D candidates to be precise), scholars and researchers from nooks and crannies of the globe.  The keynote presentations were highly informative. The two presentations were titled “The Next Wave in Wireless Technology: Challenges and Solutions” and “Current Frontiers in Wireless Communications: Fast & Green & Dirty.”  Technical presentations began on Monday, and some of the work/papers that I found interesting were “Personalization-Based Optimization of Real-Time Service Delivery in a Multi-Device Environment” and “Context-Aware Trust and Privacy Application for Mobile Identification System.”
Before my presentation, I was presented the travel grant award. This grant will be the second I have won. The first grant was during CoNEXT 2007, which was held in New York, USA, on December 7-10, 2007. The presentation was a good one, and a number of listeners showed interest in my work. I was asked if I had the extension (TransferHTTP) on the Mozilla website. “Yes, it is on the Mozdev website,” I answered. Not long after the presentation, someone referred me to a similar work by the name OPEN (Open Pervasive Environments for migratory iNteractive services). I also sent him, in my reply to his email, my project URL – http://transferhttp.mozdev.org. A senior lecturer at the University of Greenwich, UK gave me her contact and asked if we could discuss my work, because they (her research group) are doing something similar. I could remember that another lecturer said to me that he liked the work. He said it was very pragmatic.
I found IEEE WCNC 2009 more interesting than WEBIST 2009. It was not only about the excess food, but also the calibre of attendees of the conference. I did not expect less. “IEEE WCNC is the premier wireless event that brings together industry professionals and academics from companies, governmental agencies, and universities from around the world to exchange information on advancements in wireless communications and wireless networking technology,” as mentioned on its site.
Drawing conclusions from the event, I realized that work-in-progress/proposals could also be accepted at the IEEE WCNC. In addition, my work was well-appreciated, and I now have confidence to carry on with my Ph.D idea. At the conference, I got a pointer on what SIP Application Server (AS) I could use for my work. For sometime now, I have been exploring a number of SIP AS, such as Oracle Communication Converged Application Server, Ericsson SDS and IBM Websphere. I am glad I made it to the conference; I am back to work!!!!

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Attending the WEBIST 2009 Conference in Lisboa, Portugal

The 5th International Conference on WEB Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST) was held in Lisboa, Portugal on March 23-26, 2009. It was a great experience. The trip to Portugal from Cape Town was hectic. First, I missed my flight to Lisboa, Portugal from Paris, France. I had to wait about 5hrs to take the next flight. Second, I could not get my luggage when I arrived Lisboa, Portugal. I had thought that my luggage would have arrived Lisboa before I would arrive. The reason was that I had asked that I would like to pick up my luggage in Lisboa, Portugal, and I had already missed my flight, so I had thought my luggage must have been sent ahead.

The conference was well attended though. Quite a number of participants showed interest in my work. Lest I forget, I happened to be the only one from an African University (University of Cape Town). Participants, however, came from around the globe, and there were not only postgraduate students, but also professionals from various fields. My paper was titled “A SIP-based Web Session Migration Service,” and the only work that I found related to my work was “SHIP-SIP HTTP Interaction Protocol.” However, there were a number of interesting work/papers, such as “Rich Presence Authorization Using Secure Web Services,” “Towards Service Orientation on Resource Constrained Devices” and “JWIG – Yet Another Framework for Maintainable and Secure Web Applications.” Surprisingly, the doctoral consortium, which was meant for Ph.D students to present their work to a doctoral body, did not take place. I had my paper submitted to the doctoral consortium accepted, but I could not register the paper on time. I learnt that it was an idea that they (the conference organizers) gave a shot but not so many PG students responded; so, it went belly up.

I realized when I got to Johannesburg, South Africa that I left behind my laptop adapter and my towel in the hotel I stayed, where the conference took place. I am yet to get another adapter, and I am currently furious, owing to my carelessness. However, it was a great fun. Couple of things I did were sight-seeing to El Corte Ingles, Sebastio; Nokia Customer Care, Areeiro, City Centre (where I had a rich dinner with some friends, and the performance in Portuguese in the restaurant we went to was also great) and many more. I made a lot of friends, attendees who had come from Japan, Spain, USA, China, Austria, France, Russia and so on. Lest I forget, the conference was held in conjunction with the 1st International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2009). Although the WEBIST conference focused on Web Technologies and the event was well-planned, I am not sure if I would want to keep attending the conference. I could only see few papers/work related to my work. I look forward to one of the premier IEEE conferences on Wireless Communication called IEEE WCNC, which will take place in Budapest, Hungary on April 5-8, 2009.

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