The week before last, Karen and I attended Middleware 2006 along with Jaga and a couple of our students. I attended the Middleware for Sensor Networks conference (MidSens 2006) to present a paper that Karen and wrote, and Karen was running the Middleware Doctoral Symposium (MDS 2006). MidSens and MDS were on the same day, which is why we both got to go to Melbourne to attend the conference. We spent the first day at the Advanced Data Processing in Ubiquitous Computing (ADPUC 2006) workshop.
From all accounts, MDS was a real success, and I’m a little disappointed that I couldn’t attend. Karen was able to get some pretty well-known people, including Maarten van Steen and Michi Henning, to play the role of mentors/panelists for the day. I think MidSens was also successful. It had a kind of buzz around it. ADPUC could have done with a few controversial papers to get some discussions going. The Middleware conference itself, which ran for the last three days of the week, was a mixed bag. The papers, in general, were of high quality (apparently many high quality papers were rejected), but as would be expected of a conference with such a broad theme, not all the papers appealed to my interests. One thing I did learn is that the Middleware conference might not be a bad place to try to submit my own papers, since there were a couple of papers in the area of pervasive computing.
