MDM 2010 - day 1

My second day in Kansas City for the MDM 2010 conference started pretty early. Bunch of parallel workshop sessions and long hours as volunteer at the registration table, along with quick irregular shuttles among the talks. It was hectic but cool. Lot of the faces were familiar (thanks to the Airforce workshop at STL last year).

Among the talks I attended, I liked the Anand Ranganathan's invited talk for the ROSOC workshop. May be because it is related a lot to my current interest in structured data, unstructured query and blah blah, and I could right now see my ideas being a step ahead in that direction. But I know these guys will make it before I can, because I (atleast so far) only have ideas, not resources (which includes my motivation, skills and peers). Palin Angin's talk on context aware navigation for blind and visually impaired people were another notable one, in which I should say the idea of providing a compact device for assistance is really cool. Well they haven't made much progress towards the solution domain, but they definitely have very strong motivation and groundwork. I really appreciate her advisor Dr. Bharat Bhargava ever since I met him in the Airforce workshop. A very nice and kind hearted person, with a brilliant career and zeal.

The rapid position paper presentations were kind of enjoyable. State of art of lots of happening stuff, and surprisingly many of coincided. I realized mobile computing world right now is revolving around some buzz words - Context-aware, Emergency and ubiquitous Services, Data dissemination, Social Networking, Privacy. I could not attend all the talks, but looked like people are trying to make real difference for fast, accurate and reliable information propagation in emergency situation (Nalini Venkatasubramaniam - she presented similar stuff in the Airforce workshop too, Anupam Joshi, Aniruddha Gokhale etc)

My running notes during the session is following:

ü  Anupam Joshi : Situational awareness (mobile agent based)

ü  Joe Loyal : Info. Management services for Proactive computing – context aware pub/sub

ü  Nalini Venkatasubramaniam : Emergency situation accurate and reliable information propagation, fast – Farecast, Shakecast, Crew (Random walker gossip based protocol – heterogeneity of infrastructure) – instant dissemination in connected n/w, delayed dissemination in disconn. n/w, hybrid n/w using mesh routing

ü  Sanjay Madria : Mobile Agent based distributed computing framework for n/w centric info processing and collaboration (in army). Challenges – look ahead for every obstacle and road condition, travel restricted terrain etc. [HUMVEE - High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle]. One soldier has to find if other soldier has already processed that data etc. MA communication mechanism -

ü  Aniruddha Gokhale : Intelligent information dissemination – unexpected traffic jam, one lane bridges, people suddenly crossing roads, human factors (sudden change) – cyber physical system – integrated adaptation on different layers

ü  Jagannathan Sarangapani : Data aggregation (disaster scenario) from situation awareness perspective – compression (condensing at source), aggregation (spatially separated nodes have data which is statistically condensed)

ü  Bharat Bhargava : Context-based detection of privacy violation – sources, identification of privacy violation, diffusing the effect (release more data, statistical analysis)

ü  Wang-Chien Lee – Uncertainty in WSN