Thursday, 30 December 2010

Wednesday, 29 December 2010

Proceedings of the 2010 ACM workshop on Cloud computing security workshop'

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1866835&picked=prox&cfid=3816036&cftoken=38119000

http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/cloud/socc2010.html

All cloud computing papers on DBLP

http://dblp.mpi-inf.mpg.de/dblp-mirror/index.php#query=Cloud computing&qp=H1.20:F1.4:F2.4:F3.4

Monday, 27 December 2010

Funny Site

A site to trace your academic ancestors and descendances:

http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/index.php

Friday, 24 December 2010

BRIDGE

http://www.bridge-project.eu/index.php/mainpage/en/

Economic impact of RFID report
http://www.bridge-project.eu/data/File/BRIDGE_WP13_Economic_impact_RFID.pdf

European Passive RFID Market Sizing 2007-2022
http://www.bridge-project.eu/data/File/BRIDGE%20WP13%20European%20passive%20RFID%20Market%20Sizing%202007-2022.pdf

What shall I get from the exploration? The answers are clear, since they are the motivation for me to spend time on exploration. But it is still necessary to write them down, because I may feel confuse and lose confidence when under some pressure. Exploration won't lead to instant output, but for the long term, it will have great meaning.

As I recognize knowledge as a connected "body". The first step is getting familiar with the framework of knowledge. For a specific area, identify the curtail points. That is building the map of knowledge.

The answer is that it really depends on what the PhD research topic in.

Even in a bad economy, there is a need for people with expertise in certain domains:

Algorithms and information retrieval (used by companies like Google)
Pattern recognition and machine learning (finance and search)
Natural language processing
Robotics (very strong, but tends to fall on the defense side of things)
Bioinformatics
Vision (very strong, but again, often on the defense side; some medical)
Computer graphics
Computer architecture (suggested by DasBoot, often under EE, useful for Intel, etc.)
Certain aspects of verification and testing (typically government jobs, NASA, defense)
Parallel processing and scientific computing (many government research labs)

Unfortunately, many many PhD topics fall outside these areas. In these cases, there is limited benefit to having a PhD unless you happen to score an academic or research job and that is very competitive. In bad economies, universities shut down hiring and research labs and organizations are the first place to be frozen in large corporations.

So unless you are in those fields, I highly recommend against it. Once you go to the academia, you are also losing time that you could spend becoming a more experienced engineer. You are then also not able to get any engineering positions, at least not entry-level one.

Your background sounds like robotics may be your field. If you can get security clearance, that may be a good direction to pursue a PhD in.

If you want specific stories, I am getting a Ph.D. in software engineering from a top-4 school. My research focused on the usability of APIs. I am going to burn the diploma the day I get it as a symbol of how I burned my career. Getting a Ph.D. is a gamble, it may be preferable to play it safe.

Also, it is important to realize that Ph.Ds. are more common than one would expect. This year, for example, Cornell University which is a top-ten school received more than 400 applications for faculty positions. If you imagine that most Ph.Ds. didn't even bother trying to aim that high, it's a scary number. The top schools produce tons of Ph.D.s (hundreds), and they compete against people from lower ranked schools that also do amazing work, etc.

How to choose a research topic

http://www.suite101.com/content/dissertation-and-thesis-topics-a17177

http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~abitebou/PRESENTATION/HowToChooseAThesisTopoc-EDBT02.pdf
The points: : It should be new, beautiful, have a simple statement and be technologically difficult, and you feel fun when working on it.

[What's "beautiful"?]

Wednesday, 22 December 2010

Encyclopedia and handbooks published by Springer

http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/reference/index.html

E-voting

Electronic Election?

Towards Trustworthy Elections, New Directions in Electronic Voting.
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/wote/lncs6000.html#JuelsCJ10

STOC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium_on_Theory_of_Computing

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~schulman/

STOC proceedings on ACM Digital Library
http://portal.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE224&tab=pubs&CFID=3108930&CFTOKEN=81377101

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1806689&picked=prox&CFID=3108930&CFTOKEN=81377101

Topics in STOC:

algorithms and data structures
computational complexity
cryptography,
computational learning theory,
computational game theory,
parallel and distributed algorithms,
quantum computing,
computational geometry,
computational applications of logic,
algorithmic graph theory and combinatorics,
optimization, randomness in computing,
approximation algorithms,
algorithmic coding theory,
algebraic computation,

and theoretical aspects of areas such as

networks,
privacy,
information retrieval,
computational biology,
databases.

Papers that broaden the reach of the theory of computing, or raise important problems that can benefit from theoretical investigation and analysis, are encouraged.