Goedenavond,

ik ben aan de Universiteit Twente sinds gisteren middag. Het weer is goed en de conferentie interessant. Gisteren was een groot feest met bekende DJ’s.

Well, in order to address my target audience, I better switch from Dutch to English I’m currently at the University of Twente for IWQoS 2008, which is a three day workshop focusing on Quality of Service in telecommunication networks. As the chair mentioned during the opening session, 40 % of the participants are from USA/Canada, 40% from Europe and 20 % from Asia/Australia.

At IWQoS, I will present my regular paper which addresses stochastic packet loss models as used for generating Quality of Experience impairments. This research is motivated by the study of perceptual video quality of video sequences, which are impaired due to transmission failures (packet loss). In this work, we analytically derive the second-order statistics for the amount of packet losses in multiple time scales from finite state Markovian point processes to be used for adapting the model to the packet loss pattern observed in measurements.

The University of Twente has more the style of an American campus than a European; the campus is located outside of the city and contains student housings, a supermarket, restaurants — and can therefore be considered as a city of its own. We probably do not have many similar campuses in Europe and I really like this design. One really feels to be in a university and not just somewhere in a city center, where occasionally some academic facilities are placed.

When I arrived at the hotel yesterday, a huge party (citymoves) was going on at the campus. I guess around 10.000 people must have attended this open air event where several DJs, which are very famous in the Netherlands (Armin van Burren, Marco V, ATB, …), spinned Trance music.

The first day of the conference was quite interesting. I was quite surprised, that several talks addressed the topic of small buffers and buffer sizing in core routers. A talk considered the introduction of small world networks in Bitorrent trackers in order to maximise the clustering coefficient. Although this are good news for the P2P community, service providers might see this as bad news as Bittorrent clients will more likely establish non-regional connections which will cause more traffic on expensive peerings.

A talk presented findings from the analysis of an propriety P2P video streaming system and highlighted the demand for quality of service in such an unreliable multicast network. It was surprising for me to see that 80.000 users were not able to join the stream at all.

When the last session ended at 6 PM, we had a little welcome reception, helping to get to know each other. A good place to meet interesing people. I’m really looking forward to the dinner tomorrow evening.

I’m right back from a talk about study possibilities for German students at Australian universities. It was given by Mr. Keedy who worked as a professor in Down Under. My main objection for this visit was to get more background knowledge about the Australian education system. Anyway, the talk was very interesting to me. I didn’t knew most of the details and it was interesting to listen to a talk given by someone who worked in the U.K, Germany and Australia–so he could compare all these systems quite well.

I didn’t know that the Bachelor with honours is usually more highly regarded than a master degree. I knew about the Bachelor with honours, mainly from students from U.K or Canada. I knew that most students in such countries leave universities / colleges with an Bachelor degree and only some stay for getting an addition Master degree, but I didn’t know that in Australia the B.Sc. (Honours) is more highly regarded than the M.Sc.

That’s totally complementary to the German system. During the talk I got the impression that the Coursework Master is for those people who didn’t make it to get the Honours. One doesn’t need good grades to join the Coursework Master program. It’s different to Germany. We have no Bachelor with honours here, only the typical three years Bachelor program — and that’s very new, as the German university system is changing now. Before we had only the Diplom (totally different to the Australian diploma), which is equivalent to a Master degree. One couldn’t graduate earlier That’s now changing by introducing the Anglo-Saxon Bachelor / Master system. Anyway, in contrast to the Australian system, only the good or very good students can go for a Master. Maybe this is like the Bachelor with honours. If one want to apply for the good jobs, one need a Master here. Moreover, one can’t get a PhD without having a Master (usually).

Moreover, Australian universities have an Research Master, it’s like a “second class PhD”, as Keedy said – we don’t. There’re a lot of differences actually

However, Keedy also talked about the development of the Australian university system and I was surprised that one cannot guess by the name to the kind of university – a “real” university vs. something like a polytechnic or technical college (I think he mentioned this because we have these two kinds – “Universität” (university) and “Fachhochschule”).Very interesting. He also talked about ways how to get to Australia, of course. The cheapest way seem to apply for an exchange program, but this seems to be quite hard as not that many Australian students come to Germany by an exchange program. The reason seems quite logical: when going that way, Australian students still have to pay their usual tuition fees, whereas they don’t when not using such a program. Why should you pay more for the same trip? It’s a pity for us, because when getting into such a program we don’t have to pay the Australian tuition fees .