This is old news, but it appears I forgot to post it. I scrambled at the end of last semester to get a 6-page research paper written for the Internet Network Management Workshop 2007, a workshop of SIGCOMM 2007, the premier networking research conference. (I went to SIGCOMM 2005 in Philadelphia.) This year, SIGCOMM is in Kyoto, Japan. If my paper had been accepted, I would be going to Japan in August to present it on my advisor's nickel. (At least, that's typically how these things work. I didn't confirm with him that he would pay...not that it matters now.)

But, as I'm sure you gathered by now, no dice. They rejected it. It was really too rushed to be very polished. It was lacking some illustrative diagrams and figures. The three reviews were...informative. Unfortunately, I think two of them really didn't get the point at all. I guess I didn't write clearly enough. So, no Japan for me.

Despite what it may sound like, I'm not (nor was I) depressed about this. It was a bit disappointing, but not a big deal. Besides, I had already gone ahead with a passport application, so at least I'll get something out of it. :-) And I'm currently working on a reworked paper submission to INFOCOM 2008, which is due in (gasp!) 2 weeks, so it's not like the effort was a complete waste.

Monday through Wednesday I attended the first "DatCat Community Contribution Workshop" (or DCC1). DatCat, or the Internet Measurement Data Catalog, is an online resource for networking researchers. People can search for data to poke around in, or they can contribute their own data for others to use. The idea is that DatCat will enhance networking research because it enables reproducible research and the sharing of well-documented data. DatCat is a CAIDA project, i.e. the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis.

I am sort of in charge of making our network traces available to others, so I was invited to come to DCC1. Not only was I invited, they paid for my travel and lodging! (Or, at least, they promised to reimburse me.) Anyway, the workshop went OK. I managed to submit a small portion of our data to the catalog. In doing so, I discovered that the timestamps in these data are weird, due to a known bug in the software we used to capture the traces. So, I wrote a well-documented script to fix up the metadata descriptions. I gave it to the people at CAIDA in case they can use it, so hopefully that will be useful to them.

I would really like to work for CAIDA this summer. For me, while the workshop was good and I definitely endorse the idea of the DatCat, my favorite part of the workshop was getting to know the people at the workshop. There were some really great people, both those who work for CAIDA and those who do not.

Friday night before leaving for Asheville, I got a terrific piece of mail. Vern Paxson, one of the biggest names and most well-respected researchers in computer networking, told me he was pleased to offer me an internship with ICIR--in other words, a summer internship in Berkeley, CA, researching networking issues relevant to my work at UNC. This is awesome! I'm so happy!