The new term starts at TU Berlin and our group offers an advanced seminar dealing with Internet routing (see details here). Today was the preparatory meeting where I introduced the basic concepts of this seminar and its topics. Slides covering all the details can be found here.

In contrast to previous seminars, I agreed to introduce a new feature; students can suggest papers as we do not want to stop them from working on interesting topics, if they can’t agree on the papers collected and suggested by us. I wonder how many students will take advantage of this, or it might turns out to be too much unessessary overhead (although I prepared a list of relevant conferences and linked their programs, students will have to investigate some amount of time in looking through them, which will of course not result in any grading benefit).

Today we had the last day of our blockseminar on Internet Measurement (see my post on day 1) and heard the following talks:

• nCap: Wire-speed Packet Capture and Transmission Improving Passive Packet Capture: Beyond Device Polling [Slides] [Student Paper] [Original Paper 1 Paper 2]
• DisCarte: A Disjunctive Internet Cartographer [Slides] [Student Paper] [My Blog Post] [Original Paper]

After completing the talks, we had a quite fruitful discussion on presentation style of every talk that will be hopefully helpful for the attending students. In general, I was really impressed by the quality of the talks. Some were really brilliant but all of them were unexpectedly good in general.

I really enjoyed this seminar and hope our advanced seminar on Internet Routing offered next term will be as interesting as this one.