Ueno

Kamakura Cherry Blossoms in the Rain

Graduation!

Today was graduation for the graduate school (the undergrads had theirs earlier in the week). This evening, Murai Lab and Tokuda Lab had a shared party for all our graduates. Congratulations to everyone, but especially to the seven newly-minted Ph.D.s:

• funya
  
• kwkt
  
• yasu
  
• ako
  
• mitsuya
  
• hitomi
  
• yoko
  

We're all extremely proud of you (though I had little to do with the success of most of you, having been here only a year). We have an extraordinary variety of Internet-related theses this year, covering the gamut from "soft" uses of technology to "hard-core" networking: one on preservation of anonymity in medical systems, one on distance learning, one on mobile networking, one on RFID, one on improving the robustness of the packet forwarding plane of the Internet through appropriate tweaks to the routing protocols coupled with a mechanism for path selection...I'll try to post links to the theses later...

Apologies for the absolutely terrible pictures, taken with my keitai (cell phone) in low light and without the ability to tell how bad they are until I uploaded them. There were many real cameras present, I'm sure there are hundreds of good pictures floating around...

The present from the students to Murai-san was an effects pedal for his guitar, which was of course demonstrated.

For those of you still to come, I'm looking forward to the coming academic year, starting week after next.

Remembering Howard

Howard Gobioff, a prominent storage researcher and early Google employee, died last week at a tragically young age.

Howard was a friend of mine, though we didn't get to see each other as often as I would have liked.

He will be missed.

WIDE Area Director

I was just elected as an Area Director of the WIDE Project. WIDE is Jun Murai's umbrella organization for Internet research, education and operations here in Japan (with tendrils extending through much of Asia, and even the U.S.). Having just been elected, I still have no idea what kind of trouble I've gotten into :-).

WIDE has, I believe, more than 800 active members, about 200 of whom show up for any given WIDE Camp. WIDE Camps happen twice a year, and we are in the spring one right now. Unfortunately, on the shinkansen down here today, it was cloudy, and we couldn't see Mount Fuji. Too bad.

Anyway, it's a two-year term as an AD, and I'm very much looking forward to contributing to the growth and maintenance of WIDE.

NANOARCH

NANOARCH has its call for papers out. Papers are due March 28.

I attended NANOARCH in 2006, and it was intriguing, I'm really glad I went. There are a lot of ideas floating around for what to do when Moore's Law ends, or when we get to the atomic scale for computer architectures. The field is still young, but will become incredibly important in the next decade.

Not sure if I'm going to have a submission or not...