As one transitions later in the world of academia from naive, newly minted junior professor to slightly older but still naive junior professor, the opportunities for service become quite numerous. Recently, I have served / am serving as the track chair or publicity chair for several conferences. After having surveyed the landscape for various lists, I have several definite preferences. Keep in mind that this is network-centric and individual experiences may vary.
- The DB World and ACM SIGOPS method are very, very cool. Plug in conference info into a web form and voila, instant posting at an easy to recall location.
- The WTC form is not a bad outlet with the web output being checked before being sent out. This is nice but the form needs a bit of work as it could very easily send out multiple copies.
- The good old standby of tccc is slowly getting over run with everyone and their brother advertising Calls for Papers. Being a member of the list and being in the position of track chair and publicity chair, I have seen things from every angle. Not getting enough papers or getting nervous, one more CFP into the void. *sigh* yet another CFP from that same conference, yeesh.
There is a fairly cool effort that my recent spamming on lists as publicity chair for a conference must solicited an e-mail, WikiCFP. Looks cool and yes, we will be posting our conference there too.
PS For any publicity chairs in the networking area, send me a note and I can give you a definite run-down of pretty much all of the major mailing lists :)
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
I still function
Very cool site for those of you in academia needing to cull the newest fad of the h-index from Google Scholar.
Harzing.com
The quick explanation of the h-index is that you have h publications with at least h citations. In other words, an h factor of 3 means you have 3 publications with at least 3 citations each. A h index of 25 means 25 publications with each of them having 25 citations a piece.
Who knew I had an h-index of 11? Web of Science, the normal index for such things give me a 4 but they are heavily journal-centric. Pretty sweet and I should have put that in my tenure package.
Harzing.com
The quick explanation of the h-index is that you have h publications with at least h citations. In other words, an h factor of 3 means you have 3 publications with at least 3 citations each. A h index of 25 means 25 publications with each of them having 25 citations a piece.
Who knew I had an h-index of 11? Web of Science, the normal index for such things give me a 4 but they are heavily journal-centric. Pretty sweet and I should have put that in my tenure package.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Friday, August 8, 2008
Back from ICCCN 2008
Just got back from ICCCN 2008. Very nice conference although the Virgin Islands were certainly quite hot and humid. More highlights to come later in the week regarding the panel discussions / etc.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Over-provisioning++
No wonder over-provisioning is the norm in the core of the network. Wow.
Per the text:
Cogent this morning is announcing new discounts for customers who commit to three-year contracts and for higher volume service provider customers. The new three-year price for Ethernet service is a flat $7 a megabit, a dollar less than the previous rate for contracts of two years or more. For service providers who buy Ethernet services at volumes between 100 megabits per second and a Gigabit, rates are as low as $6 per megabit for a three-year contract. Service providers who buy between one Gigabit and 10 gigabits will enjoy a three-year contract rate of $5 a meg, and those that consume a full 10 gigabit port can pay as little as $4 a meg on a three-year contract.
Per the text:
Cogent this morning is announcing new discounts for customers who commit to three-year contracts and for higher volume service provider customers. The new three-year price for Ethernet service is a flat $7 a megabit, a dollar less than the previous rate for contracts of two years or more. For service providers who buy Ethernet services at volumes between 100 megabits per second and a Gigabit, rates are as low as $6 per megabit for a three-year contract. Service providers who buy between one Gigabit and 10 gigabits will enjoy a three-year contract rate of $5 a meg, and those that consume a full 10 gigabit port can pay as little as $4 a meg on a three-year contract.
Monday, June 16, 2008
HD as a Natural DRM
I think my list of tasks is now finally approaching a manageable level hopefully giving a bit more time to post what should be at least weekly content. Up this week is our recent position paper on using the size of HD as a natural DRM. While the paper unfortunately did not make it into NSPW, the topic is interesting enough that we have converted it over to a technical report and wiki-fied it. If anyone has a good LaTeX to Wiki converter, please let me know.
The thrust of the paper is relatively simple, is the size of high definition content (30+ GB) sufficient to act as a natural DRM and deterrent to file sharing. Taking a cue from music sharing, WAV file sharing certainly existed but the content was fairly large and the bandwidth speeds for exceptionally bad at that time. With the emergence of the MP3, all of that changed making sharing much easier. In some sense, HD content follows a similar parallel in that it is an order of magnitude greater in terms of size versus DVD and two orders of magnitude greater than CD-focused content.
If one looks at the general dynamics of beginning the seed of a movie say via BitTorrent, a fully symmetric link would take roughly 40 minutes to grab a 30 GB Blu-Ray disc (12.5 MB/s net speed ignoring headers, assuming TCP kept the pipe full, ignoring the ramp up in congestion avoidance). Now, while I would love for 100 Mb/s symmetric bandwidth to rapidly grow in the US, I simply do not see that happening any time in the near term. Taking DSL and sharing cuts bandwidth down by a factor of 10 on the downstream and 100 on the upstream. While P2P helps with that sharing, the file still has to get distributed out past that initial seeder. Given that one probably does not want to hang out too long on a given torrent with pirated content (*AA actions) nor wants to pay the potential bandwidth costs (size caps via Time Warner), is anyone going to be all that keen to share pirated HD content?
Ah, but what about smaller content as several of the reviewers raised? Sure, feel free to DRM away but the premise of the paper is that for HD content, it doesn't add all that match. With the analog hole (for any content) and nearly every DRM mechanism being cracked shortly after release, why bother? Can disc copying occur then? Most definitely but it is more like copying the analog tape of old rather than the easy, quick file sharing of today. Is it easier to copy or just to loan a disc? My thinking is that the economics of sharing (size caps on the upstream) will be a far more effective deterrent at sharing than DRM will ever be. Moreover, as the paper mentions, it is in the interest of the ISPs to try to swat down the heavy tail or at least convert that heavy tail into a net economic gain. We've already seen this with the recent brouhaha over P2P throttling and as much as one would like the all you upload buffet to continue, those days are likely numbered at least for the near term. It is quite easy to pick out the heavy tail on the upload and keep the "good" netizens from being penalized (good as in profitable subscribers to an ISP).
Long story short, it is an interesting topic of discussion in general with regards to design. Interesting questions as well would be quantifying the total energy cost of HD DRM or comparing it to applying it on Folding@Home or SETI@Home (computations spent). Alternatively, could one embed multiple signatures from the source side (ala steganography) to assist with tracing the root of shared content (40 GB is a lot of space to hide stuff but can it be done fast on the production side)? At what point are speeds feasible where DRM might need to be imposed, i.e. what is the cutoff where DRM is necessary (if at all)?
The thrust of the paper is relatively simple, is the size of high definition content (30+ GB) sufficient to act as a natural DRM and deterrent to file sharing. Taking a cue from music sharing, WAV file sharing certainly existed but the content was fairly large and the bandwidth speeds for exceptionally bad at that time. With the emergence of the MP3, all of that changed making sharing much easier. In some sense, HD content follows a similar parallel in that it is an order of magnitude greater in terms of size versus DVD and two orders of magnitude greater than CD-focused content.
If one looks at the general dynamics of beginning the seed of a movie say via BitTorrent, a fully symmetric link would take roughly 40 minutes to grab a 30 GB Blu-Ray disc (12.5 MB/s net speed ignoring headers, assuming TCP kept the pipe full, ignoring the ramp up in congestion avoidance). Now, while I would love for 100 Mb/s symmetric bandwidth to rapidly grow in the US, I simply do not see that happening any time in the near term. Taking DSL and sharing cuts bandwidth down by a factor of 10 on the downstream and 100 on the upstream. While P2P helps with that sharing, the file still has to get distributed out past that initial seeder. Given that one probably does not want to hang out too long on a given torrent with pirated content (*AA actions) nor wants to pay the potential bandwidth costs (size caps via Time Warner), is anyone going to be all that keen to share pirated HD content?
Ah, but what about smaller content as several of the reviewers raised? Sure, feel free to DRM away but the premise of the paper is that for HD content, it doesn't add all that match. With the analog hole (for any content) and nearly every DRM mechanism being cracked shortly after release, why bother? Can disc copying occur then? Most definitely but it is more like copying the analog tape of old rather than the easy, quick file sharing of today. Is it easier to copy or just to loan a disc? My thinking is that the economics of sharing (size caps on the upstream) will be a far more effective deterrent at sharing than DRM will ever be. Moreover, as the paper mentions, it is in the interest of the ISPs to try to swat down the heavy tail or at least convert that heavy tail into a net economic gain. We've already seen this with the recent brouhaha over P2P throttling and as much as one would like the all you upload buffet to continue, those days are likely numbered at least for the near term. It is quite easy to pick out the heavy tail on the upload and keep the "good" netizens from being penalized (good as in profitable subscribers to an ISP).
Long story short, it is an interesting topic of discussion in general with regards to design. Interesting questions as well would be quantifying the total energy cost of HD DRM or comparing it to applying it on Folding@Home or SETI@Home (computations spent). Alternatively, could one embed multiple signatures from the source side (ala steganography) to assist with tracing the root of shared content (40 GB is a lot of space to hide stuff but can it be done fast on the production side)? At what point are speeds feasible where DRM might need to be imposed, i.e. what is the cutoff where DRM is necessary (if at all)?
Sunday, May 4, 2008
I still function....
Wow, long time since the blog has seen an honest to goodness post. I'll just make a mental note that teaching a second course, even if it is a boutique course, and serving on a few university level committees are an amazing time sink.
Anyway, a few interesting updates since the last time I posted:
INFOCOM TPC: Whoot! Finally made it in which was nice and just in time for the promotion and tenure package for the fall. Special thanks to the anonymous individuals who pulled me in :)
RIPPS Demo We did a slightly working of RIPPS (our work on detecting rogue wireless access points) at INFOCOM 2008. USB and Mac Mini's do not play that well together when you toss libpcap into the mix.
Travel, travel, travel Per the recommendations of Azer Bestavros, I did the first leg of my CAREER evangelization tour visiting Univ. of Connecticut, Boston University, MIT, and Univ. of Kentucky in a one week span. Plenty of wonderful feedback and comments on the two works presented (RIPPS and my CAREER work).
Now that the semester is almost winding down, my goal is to bring the inter-post time way, way down and to muse on our weekly papers. We tried an experiment of discussion topics and papers which did not fare nearly as well.
Anyway, a few interesting updates since the last time I posted:
INFOCOM TPC: Whoot! Finally made it in which was nice and just in time for the promotion and tenure package for the fall. Special thanks to the anonymous individuals who pulled me in :)
RIPPS Demo We did a slightly working of RIPPS (our work on detecting rogue wireless access points) at INFOCOM 2008. USB and Mac Mini's do not play that well together when you toss libpcap into the mix.
Travel, travel, travel Per the recommendations of Azer Bestavros, I did the first leg of my CAREER evangelization tour visiting Univ. of Connecticut, Boston University, MIT, and Univ. of Kentucky in a one week span. Plenty of wonderful feedback and comments on the two works presented (RIPPS and my CAREER work).
Now that the semester is almost winding down, my goal is to bring the inter-post time way, way down and to muse on our weekly papers. We tried an experiment of discussion topics and papers which did not fare nearly as well.
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