Conferences

This afternoon has been quite slow. My path 340, 348, 495, 612, 193, and 467. The key slower of the afternoon has been the fact that for each of the session there has always been a missing presenter. May be because it is a Saturday afternoon in Barcelona, but then I check the rest of the parallel tracks and it seams quite endemic it. Anyway, I run into an interesting talk about how to map workflows onto multicore architectures—paper 340. It was just a talk that lead straight to scheduling problems of direct acyclic graphs. I ask about the cyclic cases and their approach was to break the cycle and use the acyclic schedule. Mmh. I also found myself how they plain to make those schedulers a reality without messing with the underlying OS one. Another paper that cough my attention was paper 193, where they were focusing to fraud risk reduction. The interesting twists there were that (1) it is, by nature, an unsupervised problem, and (2) they were trying to do both detection and prevention. Unfortunately the only evolutionary computation related paper— paper 306-–had no presenter… A total different story has been Moira Norrie keynote speech. She has presented their research efforts on paper & the digital world. A very interesting presentation covering from basic technologies—Anoto-–and latest digital paper products—Livescribe-–to their research on interactive paper. The basic idea, paper that allows you to interact with the content—for instance multimedia one. Their research involves from clicking on paper, to gestures, to the infrastructure (iServer) their cross-media information server, and their plugins—such as iPaper. Active components (no, not the Microsoft ones) are the bridges they build to control media from a paper and digital pen. Of course, they can also record annotations, whiteboards, audio, or also support collaboration via multiple pens usage. Other interesting usages of the digital paper was information search and proofreading to mention a few. You can find more information on Moira’s home page. ...

My morning jam involved papers 102, 363, 395, 450 709, 234, 392 and 499-–that included a poster session too. There were some puzzling questions running around my head. Just one example out of paper 450; there are always many terminologies meaning the same and rewrite or revolve around the same problem: where is the difference between multicriteria optimization instead of multiobjective optimization. As I said, puzzling. I also ran into a poster during the jam by Intel folks (paper 234) worth to mention. It was not proposing new technology but building on the creation of distributed data centers via virtualization technologies. They coined the term SVG’s to describe virtualization + data isolation + services providing. More on the level of exercise to show how people can move to virtual data centers hosted in the cloud, than on proposing new technology—they said they run VMWare for all the virtualization. The question still buzzes in my head unanswered: How is this new or different from Amazon’s EC2? The answer was that they focusses on the infrastructure not on hosting—which puzzled me more after claiming they rely on VMWare-–I guess that I will need to dig deeper to get a better picture of their work. Just getting close to the lunch break, paper 195 presented some work on an engineering approach to determine the emotional signature on clothing website. Built around the Kansei method, the paper resonate in my head very close to the Gladwell’s Blink book. ...

Jorge Cardoso (SAP Research @ Dressden) presented their efforts on Thetsus/Texo. They are using the SOA paradigm as a way to reengineer business processes, pushing the good’old functional design decomposition to the next level. The building stone of their work is the ISE methodology that proposes to streamline as follows. Innovation Requirements Design Implementation Preparation to market Market lunch The interesting twist of the methodology is that it also tries to treat each of these steps as services, raising again the buzz word of the conferences “business services”. ...

My second afternoon session was formed by paper 506, 553, and 582. Machine learning was the pervasive fabric for this session. From bayesian network modeling for network intrusion detection and machine learning for process mining, to music information retrieval and similarity measures. All of them were interesting on their own, but I would like to write down some of the thoughts about paper 553. The paper focussed on process mining. Basically from a log of a process they reconstructed the events and graph and tried to induce the business rules governing the process. They authors took a divide and conquer approach to simplify the modeling inside smaller regions of the problem—very similar to the GALE approach back in 1999, or the mixed decision trees paper. After the talk was over I kept wondering where is the connection between process mining and provenance mining—provenance can be defined as the execution history of computer processes which were utilized to compute a final piece of data. Quite an intriguing thought. ...

I attended four papers (you can check the abstracts of Friday papers here): paper 304, 323, 538, and 434. On of the paper has nobody to present it. There were quite a bunch of interesting ideas. I just want to mention one of them. Two papers presented several methodologies to model SOA. Another interesting approach was the claim (papers 304 and 434) that SOA can be used for modeling business processes, and have little to do with information technologies. They claimed that such a connection to information technologies should be done once the SOA business processes are well defined. This may sound quite estrange if you are coming from a technical background. However, it is not far fetch. It just sound like a reincarnation of the late nineties hype on business reengineering via functional designs—which SAP rided so successful. Interestingly Jorge Cardoso also hinted this direction during the morning panel. ...