On May 15th, 2009, I defended my dissertation. The title of the dissertation is "Positioning and Communicating with 802.11". The defense started with a 30 minutes presentation. I talked about my work and the research results I obtained during my 3,5 years of research. After this, the examining professors (Prof. Freiling, Prof. Effelsberg, Prof. Wehrle, and Prof. Moerkotte) asked me questions about my work for about 40 minutes. Afterwards, the professors discussed my work and graded my defense. After more than 75 minutes the defense was over I received my Ph.D. I am pretty happy about this! :-)
After the defense, I hosted a small party where a lot of friends, family, and colleagues attended. The following two pictures were taken during the party.
This picture shows me explaining the elements of my Ph.D. head. The Ph.D. head was created by my colleagues and they gave to me as present. The head is super cool and it contains many elements characterizing me and my (research) work. Special thanks to my colleagues for this lovely head.
Prof. Effelsberg, my father and me in discussion.
Special thanks also to my friends who helped me preparing the party and cleaning up afterwards.
This will probably be the last posting in the Ph.D. category of my blog. If I decide to do another Ph.D. I will let you know here. ;-)
Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 15:13 2009-05-24 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (2)
Co-organizing the Hucubis Workshop (co-located to Mobiquitous) (Ph.D. studies)
Last Friday, the Hucubis workshop was held at the Trinity College in Dublin. The technical program committee selected five submissions to be presented during the workshop. Unfortunately, one of the presenters could not enter Ireland due to visa problems. So, four research papers were presented during the course of the workshop. It was quite interesting to see what other research groups are doing and what their results are. However, the best thing from my point of the view was the long and thorough discussion after the paper presentations. The discussion between the fourteen attendees was focusing on "user control in ubiquitous systems". During the discussion, we all realized that the term "user control in ubiquitous systems" is not well defined so far. We have to fix this to make sure that we all have in mind the same thing when we talk about user control in ubiquitous systems. Another interested fact was that user control in ubiquitous systems can be perceived from different point of views which has different implications on future research. One result I take home from this workshop is that this research area is quite interesting and shows big potential for future research. I believe we still stand at the beginning of research in this area. Let's see what happens in the next couple of month. ;-)
Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 16:27 2008-08-02 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Visiting Prof. Wehrle (Ph.D. studies)
Two weeks ago, I was visiting Prof. Dr. Wehrle at the RWTH Aachen. Prof. Wehrle invited me to present my dissertation during course of the Graduiertenkolleg. My talk went smooth and after one hour I was done with my slides and all questions were answered. After the talk, Prof. Wehrle hosted a bbq and even that it started raining we had a lot of fun. Especially, the turn-table soccer games were just great! ;-) I am glad that Prof. Wehrle agreed to be my second supervisor for my dissertation. So, I will see him soon in Mannheim during my defence of my dissertation.
Posted by Thomas King at 02:08 2008-07-22 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
3 Weeks in the USA: 2 Conferences, 7 Flights and Visiting Skyhook Wireless (Ph.D. studies)
I travelled the USA from 06/16-07/04/08. My first stop was in Breckenridge, Colorado where I attended the ACM MobiSys. During the conference, my co-author Mikkel and I presented our paper entitled ComPoScan: Adaptive Scanning for Efficient Concurrent Communications and Positioning with 802.11. It was really an exciting time listing to the all the great work that has been presented during MobiSys. Attending one of the most high impact conferences in the area of mobile wireless networking is always fun. You see a lot of great research and talking to very smart and clever researchers inspires me every time. One of the outstanding moments during this time was my discussion about Monitor Sniffing with Prof. Jakob Eriksson (MIT). It was just great to hear that he liked the idea and that he wants to look into this research work. After MobiSys ended I spend a day hiking with four other Ph.D. students. We selected the McCullough Gulch Track for our trip and as the pictures show we had a lot of fun! ;-)
The second week of my stay I spend in Newport Beach, California. There, I attended the IEEE WoWMoM conference where I also presented another part of my research work. As you probably already guess, I really enjoyed my stay in California. The weather was lovely and the beach was close enough so that I was able to go there during the mornings and afternoons.
After the WoWMoM conference closed, two other German Ph.D. students and I drove a bit more north, closer to Los Angeles. We stayed there for three days. Our main amusement was to go to the beach and to do some sightseeing. Being in Hollywood is still nice, even that it was my third time! ;-)
Actually, my plan was to take the last week of my stay off, so that I could enjoy beautiful California even more. However, Skyhook Wireless Inc. called in so I flew over to Boston to meet these guys. They are really nice and smart. As you probably do not know, Skyhook Wireless is the company that licensed their 802.11-based positioning technology to Apple. All the positioning stuff you see in the current Apple iPhone and iPod Touch is based on Skyhook Wireless’ technology. After we had a nice discussion about the current problems with 802.11-based positioning systems, we talked about the bright future that lies in front of 802.11-based positioning systems. It was really great to talk to these guys. Thanks for hosting me!
Cheers, Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 02:01 2008-07-22 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Back to normal (Ph.D. studies)
The email servers of the University of Mannheim are back to normal. I received emails for the last couple of days without any hiccups. Hopefully, this email server outage was something that will not happen anymore in the future. Unfortunately, I am still missing emails for the time period of 06/04 till 06/12. So, if I have not answered your email the chances are high that thus email got lost in space. ;-) Please resend your email.
Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 22:52 2008-06-19 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Dissertation Submitted for Review and Other News ;-) (Ph.D. studies)
I know, I have been quite unresponsive the last couple of weeks. I feel very sorry for this, but I have a great excuse: I finished my dissertation. ;-) Actually, I already finished it Monday last week. After I handed it over to my supervisor I felt so exhausted that I asked for a for a few days off. During my holidays I basically did nothing. ;-) It felt so good to just do nothing but lazing around the whole day! *g* The email system at my university broke down Tuesday last week which meant I was not able to read my emails until today (more than six days *arg*). Today, it was my first day at the office after my vacations and around noon I got access to my emails, again. However, it looks like the queues of the email servers are still full because the new emails are trickling. I devoted this additional rest period to prepare my slides for the conferences I am going to attend in the following weeks.;-)
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 00:01 2008-06-10 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Dagstuhl - It is always a nice place to be (Ph.D. studies)
I spent the last week in Dagstuhl to attend a research seminar. The goal of the seminar was to work on a planed book about "Simulation and Modelling of Computer Networks". Actually, I am not going to write a whole book by myself, instead I am going to write one chapter or tow. I already arrived on Monday to sit together with my colleagues to work hard on a chapter. It looks like it was worth the efforts. We did a major step in the right direction: The content of the chapter is finalized. Additionally, we found a few more highly interesting papers that will be referenced in the book. The next step is to write the whole thing. Let's see how long it will take to finish my part of the work! I hope I can make it in a few weeks. ;-) However, before I am able to start writing my part I have to finish my ph.d. dissertation. Keep the fingers crossed! ;-)
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 16:59 2008-04-22 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Organizing the HUCUBIS Workshop (Ph.D. studies)
Together with my colleagues Gregor Schiele and Stephan Kopf I am co-organizing the HUCUBIS workshop. HUCUBIS is an abbreviation for "HUman Control of UBIquitous Systems"; this is also the written title of the workshop. HUCUBIS is co-located to MobiQuitous and will be held in Dublin, Ireland during Juli 25. Besides my job as technical program member I am also the website chair. This means I have spend some time together with one of my students to prepare a website advertising the workshop. A detailed description of the workshop together with additional information about the organization of the workshop is available from the workshop's website. Feel free to submit a paper! ;-)
Actually, it is the first time that I am involved in the organization of such an event. Of course, I have been supporting the MDM 2007 conference but being a technical program member is something completely different than just helping out as local organizer. So far it makes a lot of fun!!!
See you all in Dublin! ;-)
Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 16:47 2008-04-22 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Perfect day: MobiSys Paper accepted (Ph.D. studies)
One day late but still good to hear: Our MobiSys paper got accepted. The paper acceptance notifications have been scheduled to be send out until 4th March but I received our notification just a few hours ago. I have been so excited about whether the reviewers like it or not I checked the conference management website every few hours during the past 1,5 days. Today, I switched from checking the website every now and then to checking my mails on a regular basis by using my smart-phone. The mail checking interval was set to the minimum and the sound level increased to the maximum so that I could be sure that I was not missing any mail! ;-)
After I got the first sign that our paper got accepted I wrote Mikkel (my co-author) a mail telling him the good news. In the mail I complimented his great work and told him how cool it was to work with him on this great project.
Tomorrow, I will start incorporating the great reviewer comments to further improve the paper. The camera ready version of the paper is scheduled for 5th April. I will work hard to make it to this date! ;-) The paper will be available after the conference in the ACM digital library (and on the project website).
I know I already thanked my co-author. But his part on this success cannot be underestimated. So, please let thank again Mikkel. Mikkel, you did an incredible job while I stayed at your university during October and November last year. We perfectly worked together and I think it is a bit unfair to you that I am the first author named on the paper. In fact, we should both be named as first authors; however, this is impossible without braking the schema how authors are named on papers. ;-) Next time, you will be first!!!
So, see you on MobiSys! ;-)
Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 23:22 2008-03-05 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (2)
German Computer Magazine "c't" Covers 802.11-based Positioning (Ph.D. studies)
The issue 5/2008 of the German computer magazine "c't" contains an article discussing 802.11-based positioning (see page 194). The article gives a brief overview of the existing technologies ranging from fingerprinting to proximity-based approaches. Besides the currently hot topic positioning with Apple's iphone the authors discuss two projects that got recently a lot of news coverage: Intel Research's PlaceLab and the 25 square-kilometer large testbed in downtown Nuernberg, Germany operated by Frauenhofer IIS. I think this article is worth reading especially for everybody who is not so familiar with 802.11-based positioning.
For me it is nice to see that at the near end of my Ph.D. studies my research area increases pace and moves into products. I predict that really cool applications will come out of nowhere just because Apple boldly moved forward by adding 802.11-based positioning into their iphones and ipods. The release of SDK for the iphone in the near future will give 802.11-based positioning for end-users another kick. Additionally, the hype we currently see about 802.11-based positioning will also increase the pace in this research area because a lot of Ph.D. students will now eagerly digg into this topic! For the 802.11-based positioning research community this is a great prospect! I am happy to be part of it! ;-)
Cheers,
Thomas
P.S.: Unfortunately, the authors of the article did not mention my research project. So, give me the chance to do it here! ;-) My research project as well as my papers are available here.
Posted by Thomas King at 21:47 2008-02-25 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
ISWPC and WoWMoM papers accepted (Ph.D. studies)
A few days ago my paper with the title "A Measurement Study on 802.11 concurrently used for Positioning and Communications" got accepted at the ISWPC. Yesterday, I received an email from the WoWMoM technical paper chair stating that my paper entiteled "On-Demand Fingerprint Selection for 802.11-based Positioning Systems" got accepted as well. These are pretty good news! I am very happy to hear this! ;-) The next deadline is scheduled for March, 4th. Hopefully, my paper submitted to the MobiSys conference gets also accepted!!! Keep the fingers crossed! ;-)
Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 17:13 2008-02-23 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
It is done: MobiSys 2008 Paper submitted (Ph.D. studies)
After many weeks of hard work and an incredible workload during the past few days we finally submitted our paper to MobiSys. Actually, 1.5 hours before the submission deadline was reached we were ready to submit it. By "we" I mean Mikkel Baun Kjægaard and myself. The research work we present in our paper entitled "ComPoScan: Adaptive Scanning for Efficient Communications and Positioning with 802.11" is about a system that allows a 802.11 network card to be used for communications and positioning at the same time. Until now, if you want to use a 802.11-based positioning system your network card is busy measuring signal strength of access points. This means the card cannot be used for communications anymore. Our ComPoScan system alleviates the impact of these measurements by utilizing a movement detection system and monitor sniffing. How it exactly works will be undisclosed until the paper is hopefully accepted. The notification is schedules for March, 4th, 2008.
Thanks again to Mikkel for his fabulous job! Without him this paper would have never been written! I really enjoyed working with this super-cool and clever guy!
Cheers,
Thomas
P.S.: I know, this posting is a little bit late but I am currently recovering from a cold I caught right after we have submitted the paper! ;-)
Posted by Thomas King at 10:26 2007-12-06 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Yes, we did it: Last night we submitted our paper abstract to MobiSys 2008 (Ph.D. studies)
Mikkel and I worked like crazy the last couple of weeks. Our cooperation began many weeks before I moved to Aarhus but while I stayed in Aarhus my working hours per week sky rocketed. Working all day regardless of the week day was quite fun. But now I am a bit exhausted. However, we submitted the abstract for our paper last night. The full paper deadline is 4. Dec. So, no time to rest! ;-)
So far, half of the paper is written and the results for the other half are already in place. Filling the remaining seven pages with text and shinny graphs shouldn't be so difficult! ;-) Hopefully, we will meet the deadline! Another weekend working is ahead of me. But I am eager to get my research work published at MobiSys 2008 which means no mercy! ;-)
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 15:39 2007-11-27 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
PerCom 2008 (Ph.D. studies)
Today, I received the PerCom notification email. It states that my paper is rejected. Bad news, however, after the PerCom is before the PerCom. ;-) Let's see what happens next year!
I am going to overhaul the paper and I will re-submit it to another conference.
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 11:41 2007-11-06 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Being at the University of Aarhus, Denmark (Ph.D. studies)
I haven't told you, but I managed to set up a visit at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, a few weeks ago. At Aarhus, I am visiting and working together with Mikkel Baun Kjaergaard. Mikkel is a researcher who works in the same research area as I do. He published many high-impact papers in this area. After Pervasive this year, we talked about doing a joint project. After finalizing the research questions we wanted to answer I applied for an European Science Foundation (ESF) scholarship. Doing all the paperwork is a lot work but this time it was worth the efforts. The ESF granted my scholarship which means all my extra costs due to the stay will be covered.
Mikkel and I started working on our project directly after the ESF showed us green lights. In a first step, we structured the project so that we both could work on it. To organize ourselves we set up telephone conferences every two weeks. Additionally, we met during the LoCA conference for a "working meeting". The second step of the project is my stay at Aarhus. The goal of this stay is to finalize the results we have already produced. Additionally, we are going start writing the results up. The plan is to submit a paper to MobiSys 2008.
Oh, so far I haven't talked about the research questions we want to answer. I really would love to talk about this but I cannot until we submitted the paper. ;-)
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 23:57 2007-10-20 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Symposium on Location- and Context-Wareness (LoCA) (Ph.D. studies)
Last week, I attended to the 3rd International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness to present my paper entitled "Deployment, Calibration, and Measurement Factors for Position Errors in 802.11-based Indoor Positioning Systems". I have to admit that this symposium was one of the most interesting conferences I have ever been. The reason for this is actually twofold: First, the focus of the symposium is quite narrow, and, second, a lot of well-known researchers in the area of 802.11-based positioning systems attended the meeting. Regarding the former, the focus of the symposium perfectly fits my research area which means that nearly every presentation was of interest for me. This is in contrast to a lot of other conferences (e.g., MobiCom) where only a small portion of the talks cover my research interests. The latter means that a lot of cool research work has been presented and we talked a lot about future directions. This was especially interesting for me because we sometimes shared a common view and sometimes we had confronting opinions. :-)
The talk that I liked most is entitled: Towards a Taxonomy for Location Fingerprinting (Mikkel Kjærgaard, Univerisity of Aarhus). This judgement is not influenced by the fact that I will be at Aarhus in the near future. I really liked the cool work Mikkel did because he reviewed and grouped an impressive number of 802.11-based positioning systems. In fact, nearly two years ago I also started categorizing existing research results and I gave up because I wanted to do more practical things. However, I think this work is a great contribution to the community because it summaries and groups the different systems and shows room for future research areas.
And finally, Thomas Strang from DLR did a great job organizing the conference. It was a great pleasure to attend to the conference. See you next time at LoCA 2009. :-)
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 11:01 2007-09-28 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Most interesting work presented at MobiCom (Ph.D. studies)
From my point of view, the following two papers are the most interesting ones so far presented at MobiCom:
- 802.11 User Fingerprinting (Jeffrey Pang et al.)
- Robust Location Distinction using Temporal Link Signatures (Neal Patwari et al.)
Best regards,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 21:45 2007-09-12 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Being at WiNTECH and MobiCom (Ph.D. studies)
Since Friday afternoon I am in Montreal to attend to ACM WiNTECH and MobiCom. As Mobicom starts today, I used the last two days for sight-seeing. Because of the sunny wetter it was quite fun to wander around in Montreal and visit all the tourist places. Soon, I am going to upload all the picture I took and then I will post a message about the place where I have been.
Today, MobiCom started with the WiNTECH workshop. After lunch, I presented my talk entitled "Loc{lib,trace,eva,ana}: Research tools for 802.11-based Positioning Systems". As the question and answer session is an indicator, my walk went quite smooth. I hope I could convince the positioning community to utilize our tools for their research. Lets see what happens in the future.
So, as the coffee break is over and the next speaker is ready to present his work, I should listen to his talk. I will be back soon.
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 22:39 2007-09-10 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
PerCom Cont. (Ph.D. studies)
It is done: I submitted my paper entitled "On-Demand Fingerprint Selection for 802.11-based Positioning Systems"! Thanks for all the help I received in the last few days. Special thanks to my girlfriend for providing me with gourmet meals while being in the office late at night! Furthermore, I highly appreciate the help and guidance I received from my colleague Thomas Butter and my supervisor Prof. Wolfgang Effelsberg!
Now, the only thing I can do is waiting until the PerCom chairs notify me about acceptance or rejection. Let's see what happens ... ;-)
Stay tuned!
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 18:07 2007-09-04 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
PerCom cont. (Ph.D. studies)
Only one day left until the submission system for PerCom 2008 is closed. I am going over and over my paper to make it easier for readers to get the message. Still, tomorrow will be a stressful day because lots of comments from colleagues have to be incorporated into the paper.
But I am happy that most of the work is done. Hopefully my paper will be accepted by the reviewers. Let's see what happens. :-)
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 00:14 2007-09-04 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
PerCom cont. (Ph.D. studies)
I am working like hell and I am nearly finished with writing the paper. My supervisor prof-read a beta-version of the paper and gave me valuable comments. So, I am going to add them by today. He told me further that he really likes the idea of the paper and that it is already well written.
Currently, the paper is 9.5 pages long and the maximum length is 10 pages. The abstract and the conclusions are still missing. However, I am going to finish the content first and then I am adding the missing parts.
The submission deadline is set to September 4th. The TPC already announced that no deadline extension will be granted. So, it looks like it will be a long night and a lot of work for the remaining days but I hope it is worth the effort.
Still working ...
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 14:16 2007-09-02 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
PerCom (Ph.D. studies)
It is 1:35am in the morning and we (=a research assistant student and I) are still collecting data for our experiments that I want to present at PerCom 2008. At the moment, I cannot talk about details but as you might guess I am still doing research in the area of 802.11-based positioning systems. During the last 10 weeks I spend every minute of my work time and most of my spare time on this research project. I have the strong feeling that our research results are another major step for the 802.11-based positioning system community in getting these systems ready for the average Joe to use. Because of this feeling I am working like crazy and at the moment I am quite confident that I will be ready with the research paper until we reach the submission deadline. The submission deadline is scheduled for Sept. 4. After this day, my research work is in god's hands and hopefully the reviewers like the idea of the paper in the same why I like it. Keep the fingers crossed! ;-)
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 01:31 2007-08-24 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
WiNTECH and LoCA (Ph.D. studies)
My papers entitled "Loc{lib,trace,eva,ana}: Research Tools for 802.11-based Positioning Systems" and "Deployment, Calibration, and Measurement Factors for Position Errors in 802.11-based Indoor Positioning Systems" have been accepted at ACM WiNTECH and LoCA, respectively. While ACM WiNTECH accepted nearly 50 percent of all submissions, LoCA accepted only 30 percent. So, I am pretty proud that my paper has been accepted at LoCA. Accepted papers mean a lot of traveling. ;-) This is why I will be out of office for nearly half of September.
I am looking forward to present my research work at these conferences and workshops. And even more interesting are the discussions after the presentations. Hopefully, I will get in touch with some well-known and very clever researchers so that I can discuss my further ideas with them and get feedback from them! It sound like it will be a very exciting time! ;-)
Just a side-note: I am currently working on a paper for PerCom. Hopefully it will be ready before we reach the submission deadline. *g* I plan to release a few details about the paper in the near future. Stay tuned! ;-)
Posted by Thomas King at 11:05 2007-08-08 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Since my last post ... (Ph.D. studies)
First of all, I have to apologize for not posting messages during the last three months. The past few weeks have been so amazing and exciting that I couldn't find the time to post updates. I am really sorry for this and I promise to be more responsive in the future. The subsequent list will give you an update what kept me busy the last 90 days:
- I attended to the Percom in White Plains, New York during 19-23 March and held a presentation regarding my research work. The presentation was entitled "Overhearing the Wireless Interface for 802.11-based Positioning Systems" and as the questions-and-answers sections is an indicator for success, I would say I did pretty well. Not only my presentation was quite good, also the whole conference was a great experience. It was great to attend to all the other presentations and learn what other researchers in the area of pervasive computing and communications are doing. Have a look at the pictures I tool during the conference to get an impression how it was.
- After the conference closed I stayed another week in New York and I took the whole week off. It has been my first time in New York, so I used the change to do all the sight-seeing. It was really great. The picture I took during the stay are available from my website.
- Being back home in Germany, I started working on an LoCA paper called "Deployment, Calibration, and Measurement Factors for Position Errors in 802.11-based Indoor Positioning Systems". I submitted it a few hours before the paper submission system closed its doors and I am still waiting for the acceptance/rejection notification. The notification is scheduled for the 3rd July. So, lets keep the fingers crossed! ;-)
- This year, a tele-seminar between the Lancaster University, UK and the University of Mannheim has been setup for the first time. The idea of this tele-seminar is to teach computer science students how software is developed in international, inter-cultural, and wide-spread teams. For this, students from Mannheim and Lancaster grouped together to implement selected video cut detection algorithms. At the beginning and the end of the tele-seminar the students meet in Lancaster and Mannheim, respectively, to build groups and present their work. As Professor Effelsberg, my supervisor is one of the organizers of this seminar and because I once studied in Lancaster, I was my duty to arrange all the travel planning and set up the used software tools. I was a lot of work, however, it was also a lot of fun and I learned a lot about group travelling and CodeBeamer (the integrated software development environment we used). :-)
- This year, the University of Mannheim hosted the "Mobile Data Management (MDM)" conference. Professor Effelsberg, my supervisor, is one of the local organizers which means I have been quite busy organizing the conference. However, the conference went smoothly and we had a great time listening to amazing presentations and meeting interesting researchers.
- Additionally, to all the work I have already described, I wrote a paper for the ACM WiNTECH workshop. The workshop is co-located to the ACM MobiCom and covers testbed-based evaluation of experimental wireless networking. This is exactly what I am doing during my research. The paper I wrote describes the research tools I and my research team developed over the last two years. We want to give our tools to the community and hope it may help other researchers to easily compare results and speed-up research by having standardized tools at hand. A technical report describing the tools in even more detail is available from a website at the University of Mannheim.
- During all my research and organizing work I spend a few hours to implement SafeDesktop and an improved version of Safe. Have a look at overhauled website.
I am really sorry for all the people who wrote me emails that are still unanswered. I will work on the large list of unread emails in the next few days. Especially, I am really sorry for the guys from Jive Software. Sorry Matt!
So, see you next time.
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 14:08 2007-06-03 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Bow before of the King (Ph.D. studies)
Today, Linus released the latest Linux Kernel: 2.6.19. And now it is official. You can call me a Linux Kernel Hacker! :-) The patch I created for the ipw2200 network driver a few month ago has been eventually copied into the main Linux source tree. Have a look at the change log message: change log
The title of this blog entry is borrowed from my friend Thomas Butter. *g* Have a look at his website: http://www.butter.eu
Posted by Thomas King at 22:34 2006-11-30 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
PerCom (Ph.D. studies)
Fortunately, I will be in the States again in the near future. I had been submitting a paper for the PerCom (IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications) a few weeks ago and lucky as I am the paper has been accepted. So, I will be in New York at the end of March. After the conference week (19-23) I will take a few days off and make a sightseeing trip to see New York. I am really looking forward to be a tourist again. ;-)
Posted by Thomas King at 22:33 2006-11-30 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Crawdad, MobiCom, and WiNTECH (Ph.D. studies)
A lot of things happened since I have posted my last blog message. First of all, I have been in the States for over 2 weeks. At September 24th I flew from Frankfurt to Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, I stayed until Friday and during the week I attended to the Crawdad workshop, MobiCom conference, and the WiNTECH workshop. I really enjoyed the time in Los Angeles. The conference and workshops were very interesting and I met my old friends from Daimler Chrysler Research and Technology North America Inc. during the Vanets workshop. The Vanets workshop took place at the same time as the WiNTECH workshop and the conference rooms of both workshops were close by. Additional to the nice guys from Daimler Chrysler Research I met highly interesting people and made new friends. I was really an exciting time. An ironic incident that happend during the whole MobiCom conference was that while we attended to the world most famous mobile networking conference, the stuff members were not able to setup a stable and working wireless network. We see, a lot of open questions are remaining to be answered by researchers. ;-)
Posted by Thomas King at 22:32 2006-11-30 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Linux Kernel Hacker (Ph.D. studies)
At the moment I am transforming to a Linux kernel hacker. Frankly, this is probably a little bit overstated. ;-) What really happened: For my research work I needed passive scanning support for the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200 network interface. After trying to understand how all the network related components of the Linux kernel work, I figured out that the wireless tools already support passive scanning. Furthermore, I found out that the driver for the Pro/Wireless 2200 network interface did not support passive scanning. After studying the source code for a while I concluded that I would be able to enhance the driver with this feature easily. So, I started implementing passive scanning and I created a patch that I send to the developer mailing list. After making a few changes requested by the maintainer the patch got accepted. That is really cool, isn't it?. ;-) See all the communication as well as the patch in the mailing list's archive.
Posted by Thomas King at 16:30 2006-08-06 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
WINTECH (Ph.D. studies)
Last Tuesday, 4:30 in the morning my mailserver received an email from the WINTECH technical program chair saying that my paper has been accepted. WINTECH is an abbreviation for Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and Characterization, and WINTECH is the name of an ACM workshop co-located with the well-known ACM Mobicom. WINTECH and Mobicom will be hold in Los Angeles this year. Unfortunately, I read the email a few hours later because I was slepping at the time my mailserver received the email. I was so happy that my paper has been accepted and I was even happier after reading the reviews. The reviewers did a great job; their comments were very valuable and I already incorporated most of the them into the paper. If you are interested in the research work I published with this paper, please have a look at the technical report available from the website of my university. I will make a camera-ready version of this paper available here in a few days.
Posted by Thomas King at 16:13 2006-08-06 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Travelling around the world ;-) (Ph.D. studies)
In the past week I have been travelling to Uppsala, Schweden and Nizza, France. The first journey started on Sunday 18th June and finished on Thursday 22th June. The reason for being in Uppsala was to present a paper at the RealWSN workshop (ACM Workshop on Real-World Wireless Sensor Networks). Actually, I have not presented my own paper, in fact, I presented a paper of a colleague of mine who was busy attending to another conference. The title of the paper is "The Impact of Forward Error Correction on Wireless Sensor Network Performance" and you can find it here. The talk and the question and answer section went pretty smooth. I learned a lot and it was great fun to present work I haven't actually done. ;-) After the workshop finished on Monday I attended to the well-known Mobisys (The International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services). Although a lot of really cool work has been presented I was surprised that two shitty papers passed the review process. However, I met a lot of really cool researchers and the talks and discussions were very instructive. In fact, I picked up a few very promising ideas for my own research interests. After arriving in Mannheim on Thursday, I re-packed my stuff to be ready to fly over to Nizza on Friday.
On Friday afternoon another colleague of mine and I moved to Nizza to visit another colleague. The trip was supposed to be vacations so we did a lot of touristic activities: visiting Monaco, hiking, lying at the beach and going out.
Of course, I took many pictures from all the things we did. You find my pictures as usual on my website.
Greetings,
Thomas
P.S.: I am really sorry, KiyuKo - I know, I forgot to review the latest developer version of poster. I promise, I will do it tomorrow.
Posted by Thomas King at 00:17 2006-06-28 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Workshop on Intelligent Transportation (Ph.D. studies)
Since a few days, I am busy working on a paper for the "Workshop on Intelligent Transportation (WIT)". The extended abstract was accepted a few weeks ago, however, I hadn't managed to write the full paper before the submission deadline for the extended abstracts has expired. As usual, you can find the announcement of the paper here.
I am going to take a few days off after I submitted the paper. Hopefully, I will find enough sparetime to start the Nokia 770 development of Safe 2.0 again.
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 01:19 2006-01-23 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Technical Report (Ph.D. studies)
Today, I published my first technical report: Positionierung mit Wireless-LAN und Bluetooth. You can read the report online (and soon here). If you do not understand the title of the report please stop trying to understand the whole text. The report is written in German, because it will soon be published in a German computer science journal called Praxis der Informationsverarbeitung und Kommunikation (PIK). More details will be released soon. Stay tuned ...
Cu
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 23:20 2005-12-29 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
CoNext II (Ph.D. studies)
Today is the third day of the CoNext conference. So far, I attended to a lot of interesting talks and during the social events I had a lot of interesting and instructive discussions.
One of my responsibilities is to organize cultural events. So, I called the visitor office of Airbus today to arrange an guided tour for me and my colleagues. Unfortunately, the office is only opened at Mondays and Saturdays. Even worse, we will leave Toulouse on Friday afternoon so we have no chance to be part of tour at Airbus. This is really a pity, because I am highly interested in the new A380 air plane.
One of my frequent blog readers told me that my last article contained a few spelling mistakes. After his notification, I fixed the bugs! ;-) I am sorry, I wrote the article while attending to a boring talk.
Posted by Thomas King at 14:25 2005-10-26 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
CoNext (Ph.D. studies)
Since Sunday afternoon I stay in Toulouse, France. Unfortunately, I am not on holidays - I am here because I already presented my shortpaper/poster on the CoNext 2005. Please do not understand me wrong, the conference is well organized and it is very interesting to meet a lot of highly skilled and highly intelligent people. However, the weather is so lovely here, it would be nicer to sit on the grassland with a cool drink in my hands! ;-)
Yesterday afternoon I presented my shortpaper to the masses! *g* An interesting discussion occured and I was lucky to speak to the famous Christian Huitema (from Microsoft Research). The photos of the discussion will be published soon (Matthias acted like a professional photographer).
As soon as I find a high bandwidth internet connection I will upload the pictures from the hotel where we reside. We pay something around 80Eur a night but the hotel is not worth the money. In my bathroom I do not have light (because the light is broken). Even worse, I can hear every event that is going on in the effluent system. ;-( Belief me, the hotel is really crap - I will never book it again.
So, now, I will attend to an interesting talk about "MRS Cross-Layer routing heuristic".
Cheers,
Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 12:09 2005-10-25 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
