I arrived at the 21st International Teletraffic Congress held in Paris. Some numbers from the opening:

• 10 borderline papers accepted (out of 24)
• 48 out of 48 papers accepted from the accepted papers category
• acceptance rate 1/3
• TPC members:
  • 60 from Europe
  • 26 from France
  • 31 from USA/Canada
  • 21 from Asia/Pacific
  • 37 from Industy / 98 from academia
• 135 Attendees
  • 55 from Europe
  • 49 from France
  • 18 from USA/Canada
  • 10 from Asia/Pacific
  • 1 from South-America
  • 1 from Uruguay

Auditorium

I have spend the last weeks in the States and, among other things, attended ACM Sigmetrics 2009 held in Seattle to give a talk about my paper and visited Stanford University, located south of San Francisco.

Sigmetrics presented a technical program of high quality and was supplemented by some very good workshops.  I had the feeling that the technical program was a bit more practical this year, but I may be biased, especially as I know of some good theoretical submissions that have been rejected. All of the talks presented at the main conference have been recorded, and, those whose authors permit a publication will be available on the web soon (similar to Sigcomm last year). I personally like the availability of conference recordings. Unfortunately, this is very rare, still, so I hope this will be catching on!

Lunch

Regarding to some side-aspects of the conference like quality and quantity of lunch, one may think of feeling the economic down-turn directly Although the banquet was a very good event. Unfortunately, it’s common in some cultures to leave directly after having dinner and switch to another place, so it was harder to catch up and many possible discussions “abruptly” ended.

There is one point that keeps on puzzling me. I believe that it is a clear benefit for the conference to have a best presentation award, as this gives the speaker the incentive to prepare a good presentation that is easy to follow for the audience (see Rob’s talk at Sigcomm last year as an example. He created an own Python presentation framework for the sake of improving the presentation). I understand the point that selecting a best paper during the curse of the conference is not feasible for the audience, as that would practically mean everyone who is interested in voting would have to read every paper. So the best paper is selected by a small set of PC members, and, thus might be biased by their own believes. However, I don’t understand why it is not possible to let every attendee vote for the best presentation. One would listen to them anyways and the additional overhead for the voting is negligible.

Poster Session

In this years Sigmetrics conference, only travel grant holders were permitted to vote for the best presentation award, which excludes the majority of the attendees. Why is the major part of the audience excluded? Just to keep the organizational overhead in collecting the votes low? What does a best presentation award mean if only a minority is allowed to vote? Sceptically speaking, is it as meaningless as the best paper award? I believe this years best presentation award goes to the right person, but the concept should still be reconsidered.

Demo Session

One of my major criticism about Sigmetrics was the demo session. Sigmetrics considers itself as one of the flagship conferences, so this should not happen to this kind of conferences, I believe.  From what I heard from people presenting demos, the session was highly unorganized. When I entered the room, three “demonstrations” where shown, where only one demo was what I would consider being a demo, namely showing some program / hardware. All of the other demos where plain PowerPoint presentations, so in fact only talks. Funny enough, the best demo award goes to a power point talk. Moreover, Sigmetrics didn’t provide a popper setting for presenting the demos; some chairs were located around three tables where the presenters placed their laptops. There was no projector installed (the auditorium could have been used instead of the room where we used to have lunch), nor a possibility to show posters explaining the technical details of the presented program. As even local tier-3 conferences have much better demo sessions, I consider this session as a major flop of this years conference. Hope there will be a better one next year, that is more seriously organized.

Besides these two points of cristism, Sigmetrics 2009 was a very good conference and I enjoyed attending.

The venue is finaly over and I’m back in Berlin since a couple of days. Some final thoughts:

• I may be biased, but, it appeared to me that the focus of this years KiVS moved from presenting “blueprints” and considerations on layer 21 down to the network layer again by also taking into account more theoretical work, which is a good thing.
• For the first time, they introduced a software award consisting of two categories; the awarded the best software written by a student and the best software written by a group. Matt Welch recently pointed out that application papers and software in general get much less credit then they should and are less regarded than “hard” research. From this perspective, I like the idea of having a software award in order to make these outcomes of research more visible within the community.
• I like the idea of putting proceedings on an USB memory stick drive. Unfortunately, KiVS only did this for workshop proceedings, which have been published in an open access journal in adition.
• The KiVS badge included a ticked allowing unrestricted usage of the public transportation in the time when the venue was held. While attaching USB stick drives becomes more common, I’m not aware of any other venue having something similar. (Although I also learned than, up to a certain distance, walking might be faster than using trams and other means of public transportation)

At the KiVS 2009 conference, I received the Master Thesis Award from the communication in distributed systems (KuVS) group for my thesis entitled Statistical Error Model to Impair an H.264 Decoder. See a copy of the award here and retrieve the slides of my talk here. Please find below some pictures of the award session, taken by KiVS organisers.

Me giving the talk.

Professor Lars Wolf, head of the award comitee, ceremoniously presented the KuVS award to me.

The first conference day is over and was quite interesting. While the KiVS is considered to deal with more practical issues of communication in distributed systems, more theoretical work is typically presented at MMB. From this perspective it was interesting to see that the KiVS now shifted a bit and presented some more theoretical work and greatly benefits from people like professor Jens Schmitt. Jens gave an excellent tutorial on Network Calculus and held two talks. The first session, dealing with issues of wireless networks, included two excellent papers (S. ElRakabawy et al.: Practical Rate-based Congestion Control for Wireless Mesh Networks and Frei et al.: Paving the Way Towards Reactive Planar Spanner Construction in Wireless Networks). The latter combined graph theoretical considerations with practical issues in a wonderful way.

The second session contained a panel discussion entitled “Standardization and Research – How do these two fit together?“. The interesting part of this panel where the fact that people involved in standardisation bodies (3GPP, ETSI and IETF) were present and briefly introduced the basic workflows in each body of how a standard is formed. However. the discussion was quite converse; panelists involved in standardisation highlighted that researchers do benefit from standardisation by providing interesting and practically relevant problems while researchers claimed that they get recognition within the community only from refreed publications and not from standards. Moreover, they highlighted the fact that there is mainly a lack of funding for standardisation related activities, which may make them quite uninteresting.

At the end of the day, there was a software demo session where some interesting projects were presented, e.g. a video multicast framework or a secured data link layer for home networks.

I’m leaving for KiVS’09 (conference on communication in distributed systems), where I will give a talk entitled “Stochastic Packet Loss Model to Evaluate QoE Impairments” in the award session (I will receive the master thesis award from the communication in distributed systems group). Although there is a paper deadline approaching, I hope to have a little blog coverage on the conference.

As the SIGCOMM 2008, held in Seattle this year, is getting closer, I noticed that the accepted papers are now available online. They can be accessed here. A group of researchers in my group at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories will present their Time Machine, which allows later inspection of network activity that becomes interesting in retrospect.

Edit: Serveral papers are reviewed in the blog of Michael Mitzenmacher.

Just a quick side note: The recently elected spokesman of GI/ITG’s MMB section, Prof. Markus Siegle, suit the action to the word. Papers that were published in the 13th (2006) and 14th (2008) GI/ITG Conference on Measurement, Modelling and Evaluation of Computer and Communication Systems (MMB) have been added to the DBLP academic libary, run by Michael Ley at the University of Trier. Thus, these publications can now be included in typical author performance and reputation measures more easily.

Due to the Internet it is easy to “steal” parts or the complete work of others — e.g. essays, theses or other works assigned to students — and re-use them by not labeling it as the work of others (citing). Writing an essay by using the cut & paste technique to copy text blocks from the Internet is easy and quick. Why should a student spend much time on writing an essay that has been already written before? According to a report by the BBC, Student plagiarism is common in the UK and probably becoming more so. In order to limit plagiarism, universities publish guidelines on how to avoid plagiarism. But what exactly is plagiarism? Wikipedia defines plagiarism as

Plagiarism is the practice of claiming or implying original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else’s written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one’s own without adequate acknowledgement.

Can there be something as self-plagiarism? Can we steal something from our own work? Yes, in some sense, and it is a problem in academia. I reported recently, that I’m currently involved in the review process for an academic conference. A couple of days ago, one of the reviewers, who worked on a paper that was also assigned to me, claimed to have found a case of self-plagiarism and notified the conference chairs to check this case. Subsequently, the chairs asked the reviewers to check this claim and re-visit their reviews if needed. In the end, the paper has been rejected due to self-plagiarism.

What happened here and why is it bad to steal from oneself? In a first step, I’m going to redefine the term to steal in context of self-plagiarism. It may be adequate when speaking about plagiarism in the sense of stealing a text, but an author cannot steal his own work. I only used this term to highlight the problem of plagiarism in the introduction of this post. According to Roig, “self-plagiarism occurs when authors reuse their own previously written work or data in a ‘new’ written product without letting the reader know that this material has appeared elsewhere” [Roi06]. Thus, self-plagiarism is more about (deceit and fraudulent) concealment than stealing.

But why can it be a problem in academia when authors are reusing previously written work without citing? Well, it is a problem due to novelty of scientific papers. A research paper should present something now, something that was not know before. A new result, a new algorithm, whatever. This makes it interesting and justifies a new publication. Thus, reusing an existing paper means consciously publishing a known fact by claiming to present something new, e.g. in order to increase one’s Google Scholar rating. Academic conferences want to publish and discuss unpublished work and thus self-plagiarism is a problem. (It is alright to publish an extended version or an article based on several conference papers in an academic journal)

And why is it desirable to do self-plagiarism? Well, reusing a previously published paper is much less work than doing originate research and increases the amount of published papers. The amount of published papers is a simple metric that may be used to guess the “competence” of an researcher (as discussed in an previous post). Thus, the more papers published, the better — publish or perish! This fact may entice an author into doing so.