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)

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