Miguel PdL

What a week, 2 tutorials, 1 massive demo session, 1 workshop, 2 key notes, 8 paper sessions and 1 special session later and I’m shattered … but it was worth it. TridentCom wasn’t so easy to get off the ground late last year but the Innsbruck event has ran extremely smoothly with many happy conference attendees and that’s all I could have hoped for.
Firstly the conference location in the Hotel Grauer Bar was excellent, right in the middle of the Innsbruck town, the conference rooms were spacious, the av equipment was in excellent working order, and the lunches and gala dinner scrumptious. I know these should be a given but ….. once you get to a location that’s not always the case, for the Hotel Grauer Bar it was all spot on.
While not everything was perfect, there were some great surprises from the conference, there were a number of international attendees, I mention this because even from Ireland Innsbruck is not the easiest to get to ….. I took the Cork (air) – Munich (train) – Innsbruck route. The other item that got me was that all papers were presented, even with some very late minute replacements …… now this really got me because I was fully expecting a couple of papers not to have presenters. This did have no knock-on event effect, the sessions in the evening ran fairly late.
And the next time ……… well …. I definitely need sometime to take a breather after all of this, and I must say there were some great lessons to be learned from this experience. You need interested and strong TPC co-chairs, I had this in Frank & Raheem, it was invaluable. You need a person understanding the fine detail in event coordination (Dorothy) , a very understanding web-chair (Eamonn), a shoulder to cry on, on the steering committee (Csaba), a publicity chair that’s willing to push your conference and to fill a gap with a special session (Peter) when called upon, a workshop chair that just helps out everywhere (Pablo), a local chair to handle regional specific tasks (Jens & Karin), a publication chair (Thomas) that makes sure all papers are in & copyright forms are complete, a Demo Chair (Sandor) with an excellent demo background and a Panel chair that can drive lively discussion (Ina).
The things I didn’t get right was the programme schedule, this should have been completed earlier than it was, and I didn’t appoint an overall session chair coordinator, now this item got handled in the end by Frank, but this is something I should have looked at much earlier also.
And so I leave Innsbruck with one quote (from John R) ringing in my ears

I don’t like going to conferences like this….. ……. I find so many interesting people and topics it triples my own research work load once I get back to the office.

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This week I received a call for papers from a new open access journal called Scholarly Research Exchange. Now I must admit when I first saw the email, I just didn’t click any of the embedded links as I wasn’t sure what type of site or what type of request this was.
This introduction from Open Access News helped a little to understand, and I’ve also been keeping an eye on the Science Commons project.
Its worth having a read of the SYREXE FAQ as there is cost for the author, and the peer review process is interesting in which

the author interacts directly with reviewers during the course of the peer review process. After submitting a manuscript, the submitting author will be asked to provide the names of up to 10 proposed reviewers.

These reviewers should not be affiliated with the same institution as the submitting authors, and should not have had any input into the submitted manuscript, or have had any collaboration with any of the authors during the last 3 years. The proposed reviewers should also be geographically dispersed (e.g., they should be based in at least 2-3 different countries).

I may look to see if this is a viable/possible avenue for research dissemination.

The very last of the camera ready papers have been uploaded and now the count down to TridentCom 2008 has really begun.
March 17th – 20th and Innsbruck, Austria will be invaded by, not another set of skiers ….. but a set of researchers hell bent on forging the future internet.
The programme has really come together in the past couple of months ….. it hasn’t been easy but I must say the organizing committee, in Frank, Raheem, Pablo, Sandor, Peter, Thomas, Dorothy, Eamonn, Jens, Imrich, Thomas, Csaba & Laurens have just been brilliant to me, and will prove to be a hard act to follow in 2009.
I’ve put together a very ‘normal’ Welcome Note on the site, I thought I would try something different, but after many, many edits and what seemed like endless reviews, I played it safe …… maybe next time.
Updated:
I meant to add I had uploaded TridentCom to upcoming.org, and found one other attendee …. I was excited that someone else from the conference may use this site …… but eventually it ended up being someone from the TSSG :-).
I also found Tridentcom already up on the Conffab site. Now I must admit I’m not 100% clear about the end goal purpose of this site, however I’ve signed up and have taken ownership of the conference. I will add the sessions and some comments and see if there are others at the conference that would be willing to give feedback through this site.

How appropriate that my very last blog entry of 2007 was on calendars …….. mine has been completely full since 17th Dec 2007 up until this week, where upon I took in New York (vacation), Dublin, Lisbon, Turin, London (soccer match) and Brussels. That’s 20,969km in 8 weeks, which can been seen on this map.
That’s a carbon foot print of well …… I don’t righly know to be honest. I think it’s about 14.7kg, but I just haven’t been able to find a site in which I can just add the figure 20,969km and it would show me the kg, or tonnes of CO2 emmitted (average of course). Ohh well I’ll still need to plant about 10 trees.
As for my future travel, I’m attempting to add a Dopplr badge to this blog so you can see where I’m heading in the future, just take a look to below.