Dagstuhl

I have attended a seminar discussing how to encourage reproducability in scientific research of the Internet. Obviously, everybody agrees that it is desirable that research findings are reproduced by independent studies (and I mean reproduced and not just repeated although repeated is more than nothing). The question, however, is how to get there. For me this is largely an issue of incentives and I am sure there are a couple of things that can be done to increase incentives to reproduce research. I particularly liked the idea to organize repathons, reproducability hackathons where students reproducing work can meet authors of papers they are trying to reproduce and I believe research funding organizations will need to use their power to make it easier to reproduce researchs.

I am enjoying a Dagstuhl seminar on Using Networks to Teach About Networks where people talk about their experience with modern teaching methods such active learning, flipped classrooms, online learning, peer reviewing, and learning analytics when teaching computer networks. (Some people even talk about using blockchains to maintain student records.) And then there are of course discussions about what do we teach students and why and which tools people have found useful for student labs.

I heard some terms I did not knew before. A new one, for example, was sandwich classroom, i.e., a flipped classroom turning into a preparation phase, the classroom discussion phase, followed by a post studying phase (often using the same material used in the preparation phase).

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.

I am organizing a Dagstuhl seminar Visualization and Monitoring of Network Traffic, scheduled for Spring 2009. Our main objective is to bring together visualization experts and computer network monitoring experts in order to exchange ideas how to better visualize what our networks are doing.

I am organizing a Dagstuhl seminar on “Autonomic Management of Networks and Services” together with Marcus Brunner (NEC C&C Research, Germany), Raouf Boutaba (University of Waterloo, Canada), and Rolf Stadler (KTH, Sweden). This seminar runs back-to-back with another Dagstuhl seminar of a similar topic: “Resilient and Survivable Networks, Infrastructures and Services”. I have never been in Dagstuhl before, but so far I only heard very positive reports about Dagstuhl events…