Middleware Matters

I've made it back from DOA. It's not easy leaving the 85-90F temperatures and sunny beaches of Cyprus to come back to autumn in Boston, no matter how pretty the leaves here at home might be.

DOA was a pretty good conference. The paper presentations were reasonable, and the listeners generally asked good questions. It's a nice conference to participate in as a program committee (PC) chair, given that the general chairs, Robert Meersman and Zahir Tari, take care of all the administrative junk and the local chair, which this year was Skevos Evripidou, takes care of all the local arrangements. (Skevos did a phenomenal job this year -- the local arrangements really couldn't have been better, and the chairs' dinner was out of this world.) All in all, this means that a DOA PC chair is responsible only for assembling a PC, scaring up submissions, running the review process, and then selecting the papers. It couldn't be easier.

One word of advice to Ph.D. advisors: many of the presentations at DOA and other international conferences are given by students that have little or no public speaking experience, and for whom English is a second or third language, and as a result a small percentage of the presentations really need help. This is especially true when the session chair is seriously jet-lagged. ;-) Advisors, please do your students a favor and help them with their presentation skills, not just their research.

Werner Vogels and I co-chaired DOA, and we ended up running most of the sessions ourselves due to a scarcity of session chairs. Werner was amazing. If I were presenting a paper, I'd like to have Werner as a session chair, because no matter what the topic of a paper, he finds some critical and helpful questions to ask about it. I've watched him do this in PC meetings and conferences for the better part of a decade now, and his ability to hone right in on the critical aspects of a paper just never ceases to amaze me. And best of all, in the evening after the day's presentations are finished, Werner's always ready for a beer or five. :-) Given that he rarely slows down or stops, and given that I spent all of the prior week with Werner in Toronto at Middleware and then all of last week with him in Cyprus, I think I deserve some sort of special "survivor" award. :-) All in all, we had a really good conference.

(Oh, and yes, I did get to freestyle on the Cyprus beach, but it wasn't very good. The sand was very loose, making it hard to move around quickly, and the wind was very inconsistent.)