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.