ELECTION 2006


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Position Statement of Azer Bestavros


Candidate for TCI Chair


Position Statement

Rumors of the slowing down of the innovations surrounding and supporting the Internet – often attributed to the ossification of its underlying infrastructure – have been greatly exaggerated. Research and innovation in Internet and Web technologies, protocols, and applications continue to be as vibrant as ever. Over the past fifteen years, I was lucky enough to contribute to the vibrancy of the Internet research community, both through the research work of my group and I at Boston University, and through various synergistic activities that have led to the establishment of now-mature conferences and workshops. In many ways, however, the extremely rapid growth of the Internet research community has also resulted in its fragmentation, especially with regards to its meetings and publications venues, with direct negative implications on the image and morale of the community, and on the quality of the research it produces. This has been a concern of mine for the last few years, prompting me to propose and organize a workshop along these lines at the last 2006 Conference of the Computing Research Association. I believe that the TCI and its leadership are in a unique position to play a leading role in that regard, and if elected as Chair of the TCI, I will strive to make this happen by reaching out to other TCs and technical societies, as well as to steering committee members of established conferences and their respective communities. I believe that my involvement and prior service in many of these communities will be key to my success in ensuring a central, coalescing role for the TCI in the research community.

In addition to the above broad goals, and as chair of the TCI, I will work with organizers and steering committee members of TCI-sponsored events on ways to improve the visibility and impact of these events. Examples of ideas I would consider pursuing, and which I was successful in implementing as chair or officer of specific events, include securing agreements from the editorial boards of established journals and transactions to consider periodic special issues dedicated to the best papers published in TCI venues and/or fast-track review of such papers in regular issues, securing government and industrial funding to support travel awards for targeted groups – including graduate students and members of under-represented groups in CS – to attend TCI-sponsored conferences and workshops, and the maintenance of meaningful and proper web presence and of communication channels that provide value added to members and prospective members of the TCI community.


Biography

Azer Bestavros (PhD'92, Harvard U) is Professor and Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Boston University, which he joined in 1991. His research interests are in the general areas of networking and real-time systems.

Azer's networking research aims to improve the scalability of Web and Internet services as reflected in his pioneering of the content distribution model adopted years later by CDNs, his work on traffic self similarity and reference locality characterization, his work on various caching and streaming media delivery protocols, his work on end-to-end inference of network caricatures, and his work on identifying and countering adversarial exploits of system and network dynamics. His research has been funded by grants totaling over $15M from various government agencies and industrial labs.

Azer's research work has culminated so far in 10 PhD theses, over 80 masters and undergraduate student projects, and two startup companies. It has resulted in four issued patents, four edited books, dozens of book chapters, and over one hundred technical papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. This body of work is highly cited. As of August 2006, with over 3,000 citations, CiteSeer ranks him in the top 5% of its list of 10,000 most-cited authors in all of Computer Science at all times. Since 1999, WebBib has consistently ranked his publications as constituting one of the top three bodies of web-related research by a single author.

Azer is a Distinguished Speaker of the IEEE Computer Society DVP program. He received distinguished service awards from both the IEEE and the ACM. He served as general chair, PC chair, officer, or PC member of most major conferences in real-time and in networking, including flagship IEEE and ACM conferences such as Infocom, ICNP, RTSS, RTAS, ICDCS, ICDE, Globecom, Sigmod, and Sigmetrics. He co-organized formative workshops in emerging areas of CS research on system and language support for embedded systems and on Internet measurements, which have matured into healthy technical meetings – Sigplan/Sigbed LCTES and Sigcomm IMC, respectively. Most recently, he acted as general co-chair of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP'05). He is the general chair of the first IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Web Systems and Technologies (HotWeb'06) – a venue which he helped create under the auspices of the IEEE-CS TCI to unify the communities of WCW (Workshop on Web Content Caching and Distribution) and WIAPP (Workshop on Internet Applications). He is a member of the executive committee of the IEEE TC on Real-Time Systems (TC-RTS), and Editor-in-chief of the TC-RTS' electronic newsletter and maintainer of its archives.

Azer's web site is at http://www.cs.bu.edu/~best

 

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Position Statement of Ling Liu 

Candidate for TCI Chair



Position Statement

A major focus of TCI is to plan and promote technical conferences and workshops related to the Internet. These conferences and workshops serve as a forum for exchange of ideas among interested practitioners, researchers, developers, maintainers, users, and students working in the technical field of Internet. I will build upon the role of effort of previous TCI in sponsoring and promoting our existing conference/workshop sponsorships, and seek out opportunities to sponsor or co-sponsor new or existing conferences in collaboration with other IEEE TC. For example, there is a good opportunity to establish co-sponsorship of conferences between TCI and TC on Data Engineering (TCDE) and TC on Service Oriented Computing (TCSOC) given that the significant portion of conferences and workshops sponsored under TCDE and TCSOC are related to Internet. In addition there is an excellent opportunity to establish collaboration between TCI and TC on Networking as we are moving into an internet-scale networked computing era.

Though establishing a close collaboration among different TCs requires some negotiations to find agreeable terms, it is important to coordinate our activities with other TC's within IEEE in order to promote joint sponsorship opportunities and avoid different organizations sponsoring similar conferences and competing for a limited number of submissions. Similar arrangement can be pursued to coordinate with other non-IEEE technical societies such as the ACM and IFIP. This type of coordination will reduce unnecessary proliferation of conferences and lead to preserve and grow conferences that are stronger and more interesting.

I will also work with the members of the executive committee to improve existing TCI-sponsored events such as SAINT or co-sponsored event such as CollaborateCom conference series (International Conference on Collaborative Computing).  I was one of the steering committee members of the CollaborateCom conference series and served as the first PC chair in 2005 and the General Chair in 2006 and I am working on increasing its visibility and stature.

I will continue to pursue the goal of increasing membership and visibility of TCI. For example, `in addition to sponsor conferences and workshops, we can publicize the TCI via mailing lists, through advertisements in IEEE publications like Computer and Internet Computing, flyers distributed at conferences, and mass mailings to IEEE CS members.  In order to increase our international membership, we can advertise through national computer societies in different countries and give TCI promotion talks during visits to the International organizations.

Furthermore, I would work with the members of the executive committee to provide incentives for increased community participation, including fostering collaboration through outreach to academia and industry.  Concretely, I will make sure that the TCI's Web site is updated with the latest news and conference information.  I will make effort to publish the TCI's Web newsletter on a regular basis and solicit contributions from a broad range of people.  I will also utilize IEEE Internet Computing as a means to publicize TCI activities and events. Finally, I will organize TCI meetings at major conferences which are likely to recruit new members, such as WWW, SAINT. TCI covers most active and significant technical areas on Internet computing, systems, and applications. There are growing demands for the global collaboration among various areas, countries, communities, and organizations. If elected, I will improve and enhance the TCI’s ability to promote global and international technical activities not only from North America but also outside North America. I will also promote more activities like international conferences, symposiums, and workshops sponsored by TCI by making cooperation with not only TCI members but also other local societies. I would like to encourage and support students to present high quality papers in international conferences sponsored by TCI.


Biography

Ling Liu is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology and directs the research on distributed data intensive systems research. Ling has received distinguished service awards from both the IEEE and the ACM and has played key leadership roles on program committee, steering committee, and organizing committees for several Internet-related IEEE conferences, including IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing (ICDCS), International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), and International Conference on. Collaborative Computing (CollaborateCom). She is currently the general chair of IEEE ICDE 2007 and CollaborateCom 2006, and was the PC chair of IEEE ICDE 2006, vice PC chair of IEEE ICDCS 2005 on Internet Computing, PC chair of IEEE ICWS 2004 and a member of steering committee and the first PC chair of CollaborateCom 2005. In addition to leadership in IEEE conferences related to Internet, Ling also serves as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, a major IEEE transaction journal that publishes large percentage of Internet-related research work.
 
In addition to services for IEEE CS, Ling has also served as editor in chief of ACM SIGMOD Record, an executive member of ACM SIGMOD, and PC chair of ACM conferences such as CIKM. Ling received her PhD from Tilburg University in The Netherlands in 1993 and has published more than 160 technical papers in the areas of Internet Computing systems, Internet data management, distributed systems, and information security. She is the recipient of best paper award of WWW 2004 and best paper award of IEEE ICDCS 2003, a recipient of IBM faculty award in 2003, 2006, and a recipient of 2005 Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award. Ling’s research is primarily sponsored by NSF, DARPA, DoE, IBM, HP and Microsoft.

Ling’s website is at http://www.cc.gatech.edu