Introduction to the 1st International Middleware Doctoral Symposium

ABSTRACT

Symposium Goal

The inaugural International Middleware Doctoral Symposium is a forum for an invited group of doctoral students to present their work and obtain guidance from mentors as well as to provide contact with other students at a similar stage in their careers. Mentors at the symposium are senior university or industry researchers, e.g., current or former members of the Middleware program committee. The goal of the symposium is to expose students to helpful criticism before their thesis defense, and to foster discussions related to future career perspectives. Mentors provide constructive criticism on the current work, and give advice for possible future direction and focus. A similar series of doctoral symposia is held in connection with the OOPSLA and ECOOP conferences.

The symposium consists of a full-day workshop followed by an informal dinner. Participants will also present a poster at the conference poster session, providing further opportunity for additional feedback and experience in communicating with other researchers. Students at the beginning of their research, who are interested in learning about structuring research and obtaining research direction, are welcome to attend the symposium as observers. We would like to give a special thanks to all the mentors for their time and effort attending the symposium and providing constructive reviews.

Edward Curry
National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Doug Lea
SUNY Oswego, USA

Doctoral Candidates

The symposium attracted a large number of high quality submissions ensuring a competitive selection process. The following 8 doctoral candidates were selected to present their work at the symposium:

Gorka Guardiola - CUROCO: A Distributed Architecture for the Dynamic Generation, Composition and use of Context in Highly Dynamic and Heterogeneous

Swaminathan Sivasubramanian - Adaptive Replication for Web Applications

Enrique Soriano - SHAD: A Human Centered Security Architecture for Partitionable, Dynamic and Heterogeneous Distributed Systems
Daniel Oberle - Semantic Management of Middleware
Mirco Musolesi - Designing a Context-aware Middleware
for Asynchronous Communication in Mobile Ad Hoc Environments
Raul Silaghi - MDA Refinements Along Middleware-Specific Concern Dimensions
Patricia Kayser Vargas - Application Partitioning and Hierarchical Management in Grid Environments: status and feedback
Etienne Schneider - Dynamic Reconfiguration through OSA+1, a Real-Time Middleware

Mentor Committee

Gul Agha, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA
Geoff Coulson, Lancaster University, UK
Doug Lea, SUNY Oswego, USA
Klara Nahrstedt, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA
Rick Schantz, BBN Technologies, USA
Stefan Tai, IBM T.J. Watson, USA
Nalini Venkatasubramanian, University of California, Irvine, USA
Werner Vogels, Cornell University, USA

Acknowledgements

The support of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) Technologies is gratefully acknowledged.