3 Weeks in the USA: 2 Conferences, 7 Flights and Visiting Skyhook Wireless (Ph.D. studies)
I travelled the USA from 06/16-07/04/08. My first stop was in Breckenridge, Colorado where I attended the ACM MobiSys. During the conference, my co-author Mikkel and I presented our paper entitled ComPoScan: Adaptive Scanning for Efficient Concurrent Communications and Positioning with 802.11. It was really an exciting time listing to the all the great work that has been presented during MobiSys. Attending one of the most high impact conferences in the area of mobile wireless networking is always fun. You see a lot of great research and talking to very smart and clever researchers inspires me every time. One of the outstanding moments during this time was my discussion about Monitor Sniffing with Prof. Jakob Eriksson (MIT). It was just great to hear that he liked the idea and that he wants to look into this research work. After MobiSys ended I spend a day hiking with four other Ph.D. students. We selected the McCullough Gulch Track for our trip and as the pictures show we had a lot of fun! ;-)

The second week of my stay I spend in Newport Beach, California. There, I attended the IEEE WoWMoM conference where I also presented another part of my research work. As you probably already guess, I really enjoyed my stay in California. The weather was lovely and the beach was close enough so that I was able to go there during the mornings and afternoons.

After the WoWMoM conference closed, two other German Ph.D. students and I drove a bit more north, closer to Los Angeles. We stayed there for three days. Our main amusement was to go to the beach and to do some sightseeing. Being in Hollywood is still nice, even that it was my third time! ;-)

Actually, my plan was to take the last week of my stay off, so that I could enjoy beautiful California even more. However, Skyhook Wireless Inc. called in so I flew over to Boston to meet these guys. They are really nice and smart. As you probably do not know, Skyhook Wireless is the company that licensed their 802.11-based positioning technology to Apple. All the positioning stuff you see in the current Apple iPhone and iPod Touch is based on Skyhook Wireless’ technology. After we had a nice discussion about the current problems with 802.11-based positioning systems, we talked about the bright future that lies in front of 802.11-based positioning systems. It was really great to talk to these guys. Thanks for hosting me!

Cheers, Thomas
Posted by Thomas King at 02:01 2008-07-22 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)