I was at MUBICA yesterday and before i forget things, i thought ill write about them. This being the first time of the workshop, there were only around 15-20 people, and there was a workshop on sensor networks happening at the same time, that probably was a bigger crowd puller. Anyways, about the workshop itself..
The keynote talk was about Syd, a middleware for mobile computing over heterogeneous architectures. Essentially what Syd did was making dynamic objects available so that nodes could then find and use them. At the core of Syd is a directory structure which maintains which objects are availabe and where they are. At this time, the directory is on stable store, which i guess needs to be moved into a distributed directory soon if Syd is to really make an impact. The other interesting issue was how Syd tackled disconnection. Essentially, objects are expected to publish proxies on stable store which will perform their functionality when the real objects go offline. I wasnt really satisfied with this solution because this sounds similar to a Coda like architecture.
There were talks on exploiting the grid architecture for pervasive computing and so on.
Also, there are a couple of groups out there working on ubiquitous health care that probably i need to look at as we proceed with CAST.
My presentation went ok with my advisor taking on the more technical and difficult questions. I surely need to practise more before doing presentations.
In summary, most of the MUBICA papers were engineering experiences, more so than scientific discoveries, but being my first workshop presentation, it was quite an experience.
