Archiv für den Monat: Dezember 2012

How to Run a Large Scale European Research Project

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The MobileCloud Networking project started 1st of November 2012. It took us two attempts, call 5 and then call 8, but the second was successful and at the end it was worth the effort.

Indeed, given the number of attempts and successes (3 out of 10 and roughly 8 every 12 month) in that category, I am very proud (as coordinator and editor of the proposal and now technical coordinator of the project) of what I achieved with the help of the consortium.

Good proposal writing is very competitive, demanding, and linked to ambition. But the challenging part is starting now. Will we be able to live up to our ambitions? Or will we end up in a spirit that is sufficient to get over the reviews and at the same time remains cosy enough to avoid friction related to ambitions and ultimately impact? Will we be able to go the extra mile?

I am asking for a specific reason. There is lot’s of complaining all over the place, too much overhead, too much paper work, useless deliverables, too much reporting, too little impact, under performance, too large consortia, too small consortia, wrong consortia, strict leadership, wrong leadership, poor leadership, cultural issues, and and and, too this and too that … the glass is half empty. One could wonder why there are so many proposals (the number keeps rising steadily) if there are so many downsides.

My theory is that, besides all the complains, it’s still frequently enough a very cosy environment. Indeed, if you compare research projects with real (business) customer projects you’ll find that the latter are way more strict; in terms of deliverable deadlines, related expectations by customers, quality requirements and so forth.

There are justified reasons for this. Research needs liberty; it’s not a pre-production grade solution delivery function. Also, collaborative research projects are very pragmatic joint ventures where partners join mostly for individual objectives driven out of company strategies (in the industrial case) and not necessarily for the entire vision of the project. This is understandable, the entire nature of writing proposals is a huge compromise and the result always the smallest common denominator, thus never fully strategic to one or the other partner.

But given this, here is the question. How do you run such a project? Do you compromise on the vision and ambition of the proposal in order to provide maximum room to exploit the project as an ideal platform for individual objectives?

Or to put the project in the center and to push for a common vision and respective commitment and frequently compromise by each partner. Of course the right approach is to find a balance of the two.

But how to warrant quality? What is quality?

And here is the paradox. All the complains about quality and impact of collaborative projects would theoretically imply that the project is in the center (mind, in the center, but not the only perspective). But this is very rarely the case, at the end what dominates is commonly the individual interests and the project interests come second. This leads to very „pragmatic, not over-engineerd“ approaches in the project and then, ultimately, another seed all the complains listed above. It’s a home made problem that goes beyond any spirit of science – with ambition, challenge, endurance, and commitment being defining principles.

I used to say „better to have friction during the proposal and a project at the end, than a good time during proposal writing and spare time thereafter“. This is now complemented with „better to have ambition, friction and reward versus a good time plus a CD of documents and some software version 0.0001 alpha in the shelf“. In other words, ambition and challenge comes first. In case of doubt, just double-check your shelves …

This all isn’t anything new, at least I keep sharing whenever I find opportunity. When consequently thought through it comes down to motivation of involved scientists, which is a result of personal, organizational, and contextual interests. And lot’s of emphasis is nowadays paid to so-called intrinsic motivation – albeit this phenomena apply mostly beyond blue-collar domains. Volunteered contributions need to be valued; cause they are rare?

I tend to agree with this but wonder to what extent this is realistic. In this post’s context, the gross of staff deployed joins projects late, way after proposal idea definition and more over, writing. A good match of project scope and interest and expertise is thus subject to random factors and not always met. Another, related aspect is that most of us wear several hats, naturally, and thus face priority scheduling.

Both features do not impair motivation per se, but related them environmental factors. Yet genuine intrinsic motivation does not rely on external triggers but is founded on principle. What I have to do I do right. This is why I believe that challenge and ambitious goal setting is more important. Intrinsically motivated researchers will be ready to go for the extra mile and get over obstacles. One very nice example for this is the Open Source Software community and there competitive structures, there is hardly anything like praise or reward, especially not financially. It’s about true belief in the mission. Another related example is the admiration of Steve Jobs, which is well-known from his immense ambition and consequence in implementing it.

For all those now claiming that this is impractical or simply unrealistic in the context of collaborative research projects. Sorry, it’s not, it’s simply up to the people’s ambition. In belief in what you do and the willingness to go after it by principle.

During the Kick-off Meeting of the MobileCloud Networking project I did present this/my vision. Here are the slides (How to run a Large-Scale Collaborative Research Project). Comments welcome.

1st IEEE Workshop on Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN 2013)

The 1st Workshop on Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN 2013) will be held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Communications 2013 (ICC 2013) on June 9-13, 2013, in Budapest, Hungary, see also:
http://mcn2013.unibe.ch/

The workshop will bring together researchers, engineers and users, who are interested in future mobile telecommunication networks and/or cloud computing applications and enabling technologies. MCN will discuss recent trends in telecommunication networks and cloud computing and will in particular focus on challenges to be solved when integrating these technologies as well as possible synergies of these technologies.

Access to cloud storage and computing service via wireless/mobile networks should be optimized in terms of delay, bandwidth and energy consumption from an end user perspective. Moreover, there is an increasing trend to implement more and more functions of a mobile telecommunication network in software, e.g., for signal and protocol processing. This enables to use cloud computing infrastructures as processing platform for signal and protocol processing of mobile telecommunication networks, in particular for current and future generation mobile telecommunication networks. In particular, the integration of protocol and application/service processing allows several opportunities to optimize performance of cloud applications and services observed by the mobile user, whose device is connected to the cloud via wireless access networks.

The workshop solicits original contributions in the topics of interest for the workshop. Those topics include but are not limited to the following:
Protocols and wireless network technologies for mobile cloud applications
Network virtualization for mobile cloud networks
Energy-saving at mobile end systems in network elements supporting mobile cloud applications
Distributed mobility management, including mobility prediction
Future Internet architectures and protocols for mobile cloud computing, including content-centric / context-based networking
Network and protocol support for delay-tolerant applications
Cloud computing in opportunistic networks
Management and allocation of mobile cloud resources, including SLA management
Cloud service management and migration
Seamless handover support for mobile cloud applications
Resource and service monitoring in mobile cloud networks
Physical radio resource sharing
End-to-end performance of mobile cloud applications
Novel cloud-based implementation architectures for mobile communication networks
Quality-of-Experience in mobile cloud applications
Cloud-based applications and services for mobile users, including social networks
(Participatory) sensing and mobile cloud applications, including data aggregation
Security and privacy issues of mobile cloud computing, including authentication and authorization
Accounting and charging of mobile cloud services
Testbeds and performance evaluation for mobile cloud networking and applications
Paper Submission and Author Guidelines
=======================================

Papers must be submitted via the EDAS submission site at http://edas.info/N13433 or at https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=12627 by selecting the ICC’13 – IEEE ICC’13 – Workshop MCN. Please follow carefully the submission guidelines below. These are also available at IEEE International Conference on Communications 2013 (ICC 2013).

Papers should be written in English with a standard length of five (5) printed pages (10-point font) including figures, without incurring additional page charges (maximum 1 additional page with extra charge if accepted). You may use the standard IEEE Transactions templates for Microsoft Word or LaTeX formats found at http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/pubs/transactions/stylesheets.html. Alternatively you can follow the sample instructions in template.pdf at http://www.comsoc.org/confs/globecom/2008/template.pdf. Only PDF files are accepted for paper review. You submitted PDF file and registered EDAS account of a paper must list the same author(s), title and abstract (minor wording differences in the abstract are ok). Papers where the PDF and EDAS account do not match the author(s), title, and/or abstract will be withdrawn by the Technical Program Co-Chairs or Symposium Co-Chairs.

Important Dates

Paper Registration – January, 4th 2013

Full paper submission – January, 11th 2013

Notification – February 22th, 2013

Camera-ready papers – March 8th, 2013

Steering Committee
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Thomas Michael Bohnert, ZHAW, Switzerland
Torsten Braun, University of Bern, Switzerland
Marcus Brunner, Swisscom, Switzerland
Edmundo Monteiro, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Georgios Karagiannis, University of Twente, The Netherlands

Workshop Chairs
==============
Torsten Braun, University of Bern, Switzerland,
Luis M. Correia, IST-Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal,
Georgios Karagiannis, University of Twente, the Netherlands,
Edmundo Monteiro, University of Coimbra, Portugal,
Almerima Jamakovic-Kapic, University of Bern, Switzerland