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Jacobs University is establishing Research Centers in order to focus research activities and graduate education. During the past few month (well, the whole year to be more precise), I have been working on a proposal of a research center called the Center for Advanced Systems Engineering (CASE). The CASE research center is rooted in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty but in addition integrates colleagues from Ocean Research and Logistics. The CASE research center proposal finally got officially approved and we are now working on filling the center with life in 2010. Expect more CASE related news to come.

I just returned from Venice (Italy), where I attended DSOM 2009 and IPOM 2009. This was my first trip to Venice and the city is more than interesting. I enjoyed going straight to the airport by boat (not necessarily fast but pretty special) and I liked the water taxi I used every morning to reach the conference site, the Telecom Italia Future Centre.

The main conference room was truly exceptional, combining Venecian history with modern meeting room technology. The audience was sitting on the left and right side of the room facing each other but not the presenter, who was located at the head of the room. Being futuristic meant in this specific case that every participant had his own screen for watching the slides and a microphone for live interaction. Despite a few feedback issues, the microphones worked reasonably well for the audience - but less so for the presenter located at the head of the room since the speakers were all directed towards the audience. But the fact that it was difficult for the presenter to understand questions was just a minor challenge - the by far bigger challenge was to deliver a lively talk in front of an audience where nobody is facing the presenter and all people are starring into computer screens (either their own notebooks or the screens showing the slides or even both). Giving a lively presentation from an office via a web conferencing system is likely easier than this setup.

Two new RFCs have just been posted: RFC 5675 defines how to represent SNMP notifications as structured SYSLOG messages and RFC 5676 defines a MIB module for representing structured SYSLOG messages as SNMP MIB objects and SNMP notifications.

The specification of a transport subsystem for the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has been posted as RFC 5590.

I accepted an invitation to join the editorial board of the International Journal of Network Management (IJNM), published by Wiley>.

I am attending the IM 2009 conference. It was originally planned to take place at Columbia University in upper Manhattan in New York. For some reasons, this did not work out and the event was moved to Hofstra University located in Long Island. I booked the conference hotel, located adjacent to the Nassau Coliseum. The Coliseum has a huge parking lot and the hotel and the Coliseum; no trees or any other things that are not made out of concrete. Google for this place if you want to see the amount of concrete I walk now every day. Yeah, I walking in the US - I should have rented a car.

I co-organized a Dagstuhl seminar on the Visualization and Monitoring of Network Traffic, which brought together researchers from the information visualization community and the networking community. I very much enjoyed the discussions with people with a very different background and the visualization demonstrations participants showed during the event. This seminar definitely was worth the effort of organizing it.

I started an effort several months (years?) ago to define mappings between SNMP notifications and SYSLOG messages based on the soon to be published SYSLOG standard. Today (roughly after 7 months since I presented this work at the IETF meeting in Dublin), I got green light to post the mapping documents as IETF working group documents of the OPSAWG working group. While I believe the documents are technically complete, we will have to see what happens to them now in the IETF and I prefer to not make any predictions how long it will take until the documents hit the RFC editor queue…

I am attending the Dagstuhl Seminar on the Management of the Future Internet and as some of you might know, I also love to create new terms when I go to this kind of events. (I somehow believe that for many hype terms, the words have been found before they were given an interpretation.) While sitting in the wine cellar, I heard my mouth suddenly saying “self-destructing networks” and so I started to think what this could possibly mean.

To understand the future of the Internet (or to better speculate about it), one should know something about the history of the Internet. There are two talks online which I highly recommend:

• A New Way to Look at Networking. Van Jacobson, August 2006
• The Internet History, Development and Forecast. Leonard Kleinrock, Infocom 2006

Especially young people who cannot imagine that there have been networks different than IEEE 802 and IP are encouraged to take a look at these videos (if you find them - it seems the recording of Leonard Kleinrock’s talk has disappeared from the Internet - which is kind of ironic if you know how he opened his talk - but good that I have a private copy).