Researchers in the Neighborhood

Even in the winter of Feb, we get research visitors in the neighborhood.

SIGMETRICS PC meeting took place up in Columbia U the last two days. Alas, I had to make my case over the phone (a crucial moment of vote taking for a paper went as follows: all against? everyone physically in the room. all for? everyone on the phone, which was just me. :)). Later, I managed to grab dinner with Paul Barford who was co-chairing the PC. Paul is sorta maverick of a researcher in networks (measurement/security), with whom you can discuss irreverentially about what are the grand acheivements, failures, challenges of the area, and come away with insights and conundrums. Paul may not know I have been reading his papers since his 1997 work on generating webserver workloads.

Next week is WSDM in NY. Torsten Suel, NYU Poly and Brian D. Davison, Lehigh University, chair the PC and have put a nice program together, with Susan Athey and Soumen Chakrabarti giving the plenary talks. This should bring a bunch of researchers into town.