TCCC Meeting Minutes - ICC '98

The TCCC meeting at ICC '98 was held on on June 8, 1998, 5-6:30PM at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel,
Atlanta, Georgia. The meeting was chaired by Roch Guerin. These meeting minutes were recorded by
Malathi Veeraraghavan.

Roch Guerin started the meeting stating that there were three items on the agenda:

Conferences

Jeff Capone represented Ioannis Stavrakakis, the conference coordinator, who could not attend. Jeff asked Roch to talk about Infocom98 and Dilip Kandlur to talk about GI98 (Global Internet98, a workshop held in conjunction with Globecom98).

Roch reported on Infocom98, stating that it went very well. He thanked TCCC. The total attendance was 697, which is a record. The number of papers submitted was also a record.  Feedback from the participants is not yet in.

On GI98, Dilip Kandlur reported stating that there were 20-25 submissions directly to GI98, while the Globecom TPC assigned 100 papers to GI98.  At the end, GI98 reviewed 60 papers of which 16 were selected for a day and half long program along with a half-day tutorial. The issue of miniconferences within the scope of a larger conference and the associated routing/mis-routing of papers issue was discussed.  The upshot of this discussion was a statement that we, as authors, should just strongly identify where we want our paper reviewed. TCCC members were also invited to make suggestions for a model for handling miniconferences within a larger umbrella conference (this will be the structure for Globecom 99). Please send your comments to the appropriate organizers:
ICC’99:
Prof. Vijay Bhargava, University of Victoria
email: bhargava@ece.uvic.ca
GLOBECOM’99:
Roberto de Marca, Cetuc-Puc/Rio
email: jrbm@equitell.cetuc.puc-rio.br
or   Prof. Raimundo Sampaio Neto
email: raimundo@cetuc.puc-rio.br

Currently, ICC99 is expected to have two miniconferences:  one on QoS and the other on optical networking, but additional information should soon be available from the TCCC representative, Prof. Ahmed Elhakeem.
For Globecom 99, the following miniconferences have been identified:

TCCC should decide which of these miniconferences it would like to sponsor/co-sponsor. Clearly Global Internet and High speed networking are two that TCCC should sponsor.  As an example of multiple technical committees co-sponsoring a miniconference, Roberto De Marca cited the Future wireless systems miniconference, which is co-sponsored by TCPC, Radio Communications, and Satellite and Space Communications technical committees. Finally, it was stated that the issue of whether to use common or separate Call For Papers for each miniconference is still under discussion.

Continuing with conference status reports, Jeff Capone stated that Joe Bannister organized the 12th Workshop on Computer Communications, in Sept. 97 in Phoenix, AZ. Next, he talked about the 13th Workshop on Computer Communications. This will be held October 11-14, 1998, in Oxford, Mississippi.  John Daigle (wcdaigle@cotton.vislab.olemiss.edu) is the organizer.  A 19-person TPC was formed to create a 9-session technical program, of which 5 sessions have been finalized. The web site is http://home1.gte.net/nikhil/ccwnet.html.  Many social events are planned. Oxford is a center for Blues music.  TCCC participation was encouraged.

The next conference covered was Globecom98 (Nov. 8-12, Sydney, Australia).  Jeff Capone (jcapone@asu.edu) is the TCCC representative.  1030 papers were received in total (not including mini-conferences).  TCCC received 85 papers after Jeff put in considerable effort, given that there was no bidding process and the Globecom TPC chair assigned papers to technical committees without any input from the technical committees. This resulted in very few papers being assigned to Computer Communications possibly because the charter of TCCC seems to overlap with the charters of other technical committees. The TPC meeting was on June 9, 1998, to form and finalize the sessions.
GlobeCom99 is scheduled to be held Dec. 5-9, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  Ibrahim Matta (matta@ccs.neu.edu) is the TCCC representative.  There was an issue of whether we need to identify TCCC representatives for each of the miniconferences we sponsor/co-sponsor.  It appears that for the miniconferences for which TCCC is listed as a primary sponsor, representatives had already been identified. Mark Karol is the chair of the High-Speed Networking miniconference. The Global Internet 99 TCCC rep will be assigned jointly with the Internet TC. Bo Li (bli@cs.ust.hk) was the TCCC rep. for ICC98 (June 7-11). He was not there to report on the conference. Ahmed Elhakeem (ahmed@ece.concordia.ca) is the TCCC rep. for ICC99, which will be held June 6-10, in Vancouver, Canada.
Jeff Capone reported on MILCOM98. It will be held Oct. 18-21, in Bedford (Boston), MA. The different areas with representatives are

Malathi Veeraraghavan reported on the 9th LAN/MAN Workshop, which was held from May 17-20, in Banff, Alberta, CA.  There were 76 papers, 15 of which were short presentations, and about 90 attendees. The sessions included switching, routing & mobility, billing & QoS, wireless networks, residential access, applications & multicast, optical networks & WDM, ATM & packet cellular radio, measurements & testbeds, IP over ATM, and resource allocation.  There were three social events, including a trip to Lake Louise. The feedback received was that the workshop was excellent.  There were five sponsors. Prof. Tobagi delivered an excellent keynote presentation on LANs. The next workshop will be in Fall 1999 in Australia.  David Skellern will the general chair, and Fabio Neri and Aloke Guha will be TPC co-chairs.

Roch Guerin reported on the 6th IWQoS, which was held May 18-20, in Napa Valley, CA. Edward Knightly (knightly@ece.rice.edu) was the organizer.  There were 125 submissions, and 21 full and 18 position statements in the final program. There were eight sessions representing QoS, Scaling, Large-Scale Networks, Internet Resource Reservation, Economics, Pricing, QoS Architecture, Protocols, and Middleware, Adaptive QoS, Application QoS, QoS scheduling and switching. There were two keynote speakers, Roch Guerin, “QoS: Too Little or Too Much (How much optimization do we really need?),” and Domenico Ferrari, “Charging for QoS.” Two panels, “The future of Differential and Integrated services in the Internet,” and “QoS in Wireless Networks: the transition form Myth to Reality” were held.  There was a lot of interest in this workshop. After accepting 150 registrations, they had to close out the workshop. Proceedings are on the web. Roch mentioned that there were some interesting papers on scheduling for input queueing switches.

The 7th IC3N will be held Oct. 12-15, 1998, Lafayette, LA, and Kia Makki (kia@usl.edu) is the contact. It was stated that call for papers deadline was extended to sometime in July, 98. Please contact Kia for more information.
ACM/IEE MOBICOM98 will be held Oct. 25-30, 1998 Dallas TX. Magda El Zarki (magda@ee.upenn.edu) and Arvind Krishna (akrishna@us.ibm.com) are the contacts. 130 papers were received. About 30 will be accepted.
Ender Ayanoglu distributed call for papers on behalf of Jerry Gibson, the organizer for the IEEE Wireless Communications & Networking Conference (WCNC), which replaces ICUPC in 1999. It will be held Sept.  21-25, 99 in New Orleans.

This concluded the conference status update part of the agenda.

Other TCCC Issues

The next item on the agenda was general TCCC issues. Roch mentioned a proposed joint workshop between Comm. Soc. and the POPOV society, which would tentatively be held in Russia in October, 1999.  Roch will send additional information to the TCCC list, asking for help and volunteers as soon as the logistics and organization aspects of the workshop have been finalized.

Roch also mentioned that while TCCC membership was increasing, it was at rather a slow rate. He asked us to encourage new members to join.  Also, he invited thoughts on improving the TCCC web site. The membership list was recently updated. Henning is putting together a list of 20 or so papers that provide seminal results. This will be posted on the web site.  Ravi Shankar made a suggestion that we have IEEE press publish a book with this set of papers, and use the profit toward student grants. Issues of copyright were brought up, Ender Ayanoglu pointed out that technical committees were not allowed to have their own finances, and the general feedback appeared to be that there were enough hooks in place for student grants.  However, Ravi had some issues with the process used for IEEE CommSoc student grants. If others have similar concerns, please contact Ravi Shankar.

Roch described the IEEE Communication Surveys, which is an electronic-only magazine. The first issue is expected to appear shortly.  As the name suggests, it is focussed on surveys, and promises to give authors a substantial audience. People were invited to submit articles.
Henning is planning to place online standards documents and tutorial type material on the TCCC web site. Roch encouraged people to not only treat this as a resource, but to also contribute to it. This ended the general TCCC issues part of the agenda.

On the Miscellaneous part of the agenda, Roch said that CommSoc is trying to improve its web presence. Dale Armor (darmor@newbridge.com) is soliciting volunteers to contribute.
Janine Amon from the Anchorage Conventions Bureau made a presentation and showed a tape, inviting us to hold workshops/conferences in Anchorage. Several tax benefits were stated. To contact her, please send email to janine@acbsys.anchoragecvb.net or check their web page at http://www.alaska.net/~acvb. Finally, Roberto showed a video tape on Rio, inviting people to participate in Globecom 99.
This closed out the meeting.