Sunday, March 11, 2007

Arriving at AOSD

Finally I arrived at AOSD in Vancouver.

The first thing I realized is the depth of the people who're attending the conference. I'm only one of the few who are still at Msc. level. The rest (of the SVs I've met so far) are PhDs. Also, when I think of it, my paper isn't that difficult (technically speaking) and tomorrow I will be performing in front of a room full of experts who know the stuff way better than I'm. It's one thing to be presenting in front of the Sable/SERG lab, but it is another thing when the room are full of people who really know what you talk about and you cannot BS your way throught. I am never very good at answering questions, and now Martin (and Bart and Eric) are not there to help me out...

Speaking of Martin my supervisor, I just received the poster for AOSD '08 and guess who's in the organizing committee! So for all the students of Martin, AOSD maybe the conference to aim for!

Most of the people went to the brewery to have a good time, but I decided to stay at the room. Bram Adams, a PhD from Belgium, has gone for a drink and if I want to get any substantial last minute work done now is the time.

As a last minute revision, I've decided to keep the hierarchal diagram drawn by FreeMind though, because that is the most effective way to explain the implicit relationship between the class that share the crosscutting concern. Hopefully that wouldn't make the talk too long...

Lastly, an interesting thing that I've seen. Guess who are the corporate sponsors of AOSD this year? There are 3 of them!

Well, if you answer IBM Research you're correct. IBM has invested tons of money and manpower in Eclipse and now in AJDT and the survival and the adoption of AOP is almost vital to its now half-open-source/SaaS business approach.

But the other two are a bit more... weird.

No, not Siemans, although they do have tons of people working on AOSD.

One is Google! I guess the reason is that John Lamping is one of the keynote speakers and Lamping was one of the pioneers in the AOP research. (He co-wrote the first AOP paper with Gregor Kiczales at XEROX...)

But the other one is... Microsoft Research! I really wonder what they are doing down here. Yes, Vancouver is very close to Redmond, MS has tons of money to burn, and they are fighting the talent war with Google and so they have to make a face at anywhere Google shows up. But I don't see any people from Microsoft Research presenting at AOSD '07. Are the MS folks working on a AOP add-on for Visual Studio? Will we witness a A#/AB.NET/Managed AC++ shortly? Anyone???

Enough ranting... let's now really start working on the slides...

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