Boundaries

I am packing my staffs to move to Montreal. This is another move after I crossed many countries. I have spent a complete 10 years out of China -- Germany, Canada, US, France and then Canada again – for studying and working. This time is a rare case that I move out of a job by myself.

It is my original dream of pursuing freedom and truth that drives me to move from one country to another and from one position to another. Being a scientist gives me the biggest freedom to challenge any routines in any doctrines. I see myself belongs to a scientific community, i.e. a community across any country and organization boundaries. In this sense, my knowledge is carried by me and belongs to the whole world. I see that if a country or an organization wants to keep a leading position in science, it is better to attract excellent minds and keep them. You can see the intelligence flows faster than before.

China’s 2008

It is an Olympic year in Beijing. China has prepared more than four years for this. The conflicts along with the Olympic flam relay reflect some non-harmonious sound around emerging China. Shortly before the Olympic Game, another test just came for China to prove what kind of a country it wants to be – the earth quake.

It was Monday afternoon around 14:30PM. An earth quake attacked Sichuan province (see BBC head news). The capital city, Chengdu, was just within 100 km from the epicenter Wenchuan. Chengdu where my mother lives has little death toll. Surely they felt the strong shakes of the earth. But Wenchuan, Dujian Yan and several counties around have more than 12,000 deaths so far.

From the photos we saw so far, our Chinese colleagues all agreed that the rescue is well organized. The moving of the soldiers has reflected the decision of a communist party – finally a right use of the army. The equipments and the rescue resources are abundant. And people in the epicenter are calm and wealth enough to be calm. Finally, you see a responsible government.

Even though this event, I have the feeling to go back to China and work there. After a complete 10 years out of China, I realized that China is now one of the few most important countries in the world. I may miss the chance to see a changing China if I stay aboard.

Leaving NRC

After I announced my leaving NRC, I have received many congratulation emails. I am happy that I am received emails from some of the researchers that are highly respected among us as the best researchers. I am happy that my leaving attracted their attentions. It seems they recognized my status in the research community. For a research organization, no matter an institute or a university, the most important factor is the researchers. The best researchers and professors define the status of an institute or a university. I hope I am one of the best, no matter in an institute or a university.

Montreal!

I am moving to a faculty position in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering in Concordia University in June 2008, after five years as a Researcher Officer in the Institute for Information Technology (IIT) in the National Research Council's (NRC), I am still an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science in University of New Brunswick.

Now, I am looking for post-docs and ph.d. students. Post of post-doc is here.

A Note for SCContest2008

I am chairing the IEEE Service Computing Contest 2008. The finalists were announced on April 16. I would like to write down how this contest is organized. This post can be interesting to the contest participants and the reviewers.

Organization

This is the third episode of this contest. As service computing and Web services courses are taught in more and more universities, the submissions and the quality of the submissions are keeping on increasing.

This year, most submissions are from Canada, China, Germany and US. Maybe my connections to Canadian and Chinese universities play a role in inviting the submissions. I am especially glad to see that the Chinese universities are eager to use the latest techniques in their projects. The improvement of the research facilitates and investment is tremendous in China. US has considerably low submissions. If considering the adaptation of SOA in their market, this number is not compatible. We should contact more US universities. Well, many things are determined by the education and research systems. Germany is very active in the past competition. And they submit high quality papers.

This contest is designed to promote teaching in universities. So we expect to see projects at the scale of a course project with multiple students at graduate and undergraduate level. And it is what I saw – some professors send more than one teams to the contest from the class. I saw teams from semantic Web, Internet programming, or service computing courses from several universities. While some of the submissions actually are from the results of national programs. For example, I saw projects for public transportation systems and national wide database queries. These projects are normally funded by national programs. It is both good and bad. But so far, it does not need to say unfair to compete with these projects. It is obvious that budget and the size of the team are not correlated to the quality of work. If things change, we will re-evaluate the situation.

Evaluations

We use double blind review. We have ranked 16 submissions. We accepted 13 papers to publish and 11 teams are invited to the final. I would say that the top runners demonstrate high quality of work, from technique depth and the quality of the demonstration. The ranking of the review is not announced. The finalists will compete for 6 prizes at the conference venues.

The final contest

The final contest will be held in both ICWS and SCC. This contest is organized in two conferences is because some students had trouble to get US visa in the past contests. We will keep the evaluation the same in the two conferences. As you can see in the Web site, the results will be announced in ICWS. That means some of the winners may not receive their prize by themselves. So actually attending the contest in Beijing has some advantages, especially for the teams who will receive the prize. So far, the teams are very even in the two conferences - 6 teams in Beijing and 5 teams in Hawaii. And each venue has teams from all countries as well. I would say it is almost a prefect uniform distribution.

In the online review stage, the demo system is just one of many criteria. It weakens the weight of the demo system in the evaluation. Some demo systems are not so complete as their papers suggested. I would suggest the final teams to put a lot of efforts to enhance the demo system, because this is going to be weighted a lot in the final.

Managed research

Can research be managed? Can your papers be ordered before you work on it? Can you produce the exact results your boss asks you to do? Can you convince your boss what you want to do?

When your research is asked to mix with issues other than your own scientific interests, for example the priorities from federal or provincial government, your research is managed. You need to consider the following cost:

1. You need to satisfy not only scientific criteria, but also additional internal administrative criteria. Sometimes, the internal administrative criteria are more difficult to reach than the criteria brought up by the funding agency. For example, you are asked to develop a local partner before your director can approve your proposal.
2. You need to spend 2-3 years to develop your contacts in a new application area and know enough to publish in this area.
3. You need to get signatures from more than your group leader to get your proposals/papers out of your door.
4. You cannot work with the best researchers in the world, because it is not up to you with whom you work with. You find yourself are frequently sitting with people who are good in talking, not action.

I propose a theorem in research management: if you are managed other than your group leader, you are in a research environment that is over managed.

Computing cloud

Moving computing and data away from the desktop and the portable PC and simpy displaying the results of computing that takes place in a centralized location and is then transmitted via the internet on the user’s screen. It is also called software-as-service in service computing community.

Google and Amazon have their computing cloud strategies, Microsoft is joining them (http://www.news.com/8301-10787_3-9883909-60.html)

Green IT

You think you save papers by using computer to process and store your data. You can even do more by blacking your screens and choosing proper color for your Web site. Here are more hints about green apps, hosts, etc.