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)