Becoming an NRF-rated (National Research Foundation) Researcher

Are you considering applying for the NRF (National Research Foundation) rating? I would be happy to share some valuable information and documents with you. I am an NRF Y rated researcher, where Y stands for Young. While I can’t publish my application on my blog, I am more that happy to share the feedback I got from the NRF office. The feedback is a summary of reports submitted by reviewers of my application. I am sure the feedback will tell you what you need to have (e.g. publications), do (e.g. organize events) and work towards (e.g. more collaborations and strong research team). In addition, it will tell you what to keep to the bare minimum.

One thing I found very scary but truthful is that my field is competitive; the reviewers just reminded of how dynamic the IT field is. I hope the below document will give some good tips to prepare your application. Many thanks to Dr Veruscha Fester of the Department of Civil Engineering, CPUT for sharing her application with me.

Downloads:
1. Outcome Feedback only
2. For my application, drop me an email

Comments

Where is Mozilla’s Stand?

Africacom ended today, and I was hoping to see Mozilla’s stand. But there was none. Opera has been very noticeable in the last three years, and I managed to take a picture of its stand this year. Below is it, and I had a great time chatting with its employees at the stand. I am looking forward to seeing Mozilla’s and other prominent software companies’ stands.

Opera Software Stand

Opera Software Stand

Comments

Afrimesh Paper Accepted at IIWAS 2012

iiWAS2012 Notification
From: iiWAS2012 <iiwas2012@easychair.org>
To: Michael Adeyeye <x_x_x@x_x.X_>
Priority: Normal
Date 10-02-2012 01:51 PM
Dear Michael,We are glad to inform you that your paper:

Paper ID: 107
Paper Title: Afrimesh: A Framework for Management and Monitoring of Wireless Mesh Networks

has been accepted as a short paper at the 14th International Conference on
Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (iiWAS2012).

You should refer to the comments of the reviewers attached to this email to
assist you in preparing the final version of your paper for publication.

The conference proceedings will be published by ACM with the ISBN  978-1-4503-
1306-3 and will be available during the conference. Selected papers will be
further considered for publication in several special issues of international
journals.

Please refer to (http://www.iiwas.org/conferences/iiwas2012/submission.php) for
submitting a revised camera ready copy of your paper (maximum 4 pages) for
inclusion in the proceedings before 20th October 2012.

To speed up the publication process, please adhere strictly to the formatting
instructions and upload in addition to the PDF file of your camera ready the
Microsoft Word or Latex source files zipped and named

PaperID_iiWAS2012_Short_FirstAuthorLastName.zip.

The camera ready can be uploaded here:

http://www.iiwas.org/conferences/iiwas2012/crForm.php

In order for your paper to be included in the proceedings, we require at least
one author to register for the conference and pay the registration fees before
20th Oct 2012. Please confirm your participation and register for the
conference as soon as possible in order for us to prepare a coherent program.
Registration can be done through this page

http://www.iiwas.org/conferences/iiwas2012/registration.php

Non-registration and failure to pay the fees before the deadline will result in
the paper not being included in the conference proceedings. In case you have
difficulty in getting financial support, kindly let us know in
advance.

Regarding copyright, ACM has an automated copyright form collection system for
ACM published proceedings. Accepted papers authors will be sent the ACM form and
complete instructions upon the submission of camera ready papers.

Feel free to contact us if you need assistance in the preparation of your camera
ready copy and in the organization of your trip.

Generic information on conference venue, accommodation, transportation,
conference program, social program, tours, registration, visa, etc can be found
soon on the conference web site at(http://www.iiwas.org/conferences/iiwas2012/).

Thank you and congratulations for your contribution to iiWAS2012 !

See you in Bali in December,

David Taniar, Ismail Khalil, and Eric Pardede

———————– REVIEW 1 ———————
PAPER: 107
TITLE: Afrimesh: A Framework for Management and Monitoring of Wireless Mesh Networks
AUTHORS: Michael Adeyeye and Antoine Van Gelder

OVERALL RATING: 1 (weak accept)
REVIEWER’S CONFIDENCE: 2 (medium)

The paper is well structured and the topic is very interesting. The proposed system has been tested in a real scenario and I see it is open as a Google code project.

The motivation for the experiments in section V is not clear to me. The paper focus is supposed to be about the WMN, but then the measurements are about the routing protocol o generic packet RTT, with no apparent relation to the WMN. Only al the end, with Table II there’s some kind of evaluation. The relation between the experiments and the proposed WMN, and why the experiments are deemed useful then, should be cleared up at the experiment description. If they are not related, then the paper goals should be better explained, since they are no just related with presenting a WMN.

Some minor comments:

Node numbers in Figure 3 are a bit small. Maybe a larger font could be used to easily identify nodes (specially #3, the Afrimesh server node)

I understand that Afrimesh was created to cater to the TelcoVillage scenario, but it would be interesting to know whether it can be applied to other scenarios.

Maybe the authors could reference the Afrimesh Google code project in the paper.

Reference [8] has a format error (“[8] [8]“)

———————– REVIEW 2 ———————
PAPER: 107
TITLE: Afrimesh: A Framework for Management and Monitoring of Wireless Mesh Networks
AUTHORS: Michael Adeyeye and Antoine Van Gelder

OVERALL RATING: -2 (reject)
REVIEWER’S CONFIDENCE: 2 (medium)

The paper deals with protocols and management for wireless networks.
It seems to have ended up at the wrong conferences since it does not address any of the topics listed in the iiwas call for papers.

———————– REVIEW 3 ———————
PAPER: 107
TITLE: Afrimesh: A Framework for Management and Monitoring of Wireless Mesh Networks
AUTHORS: Michael Adeyeye and Antoine Van Gelder

OVERALL RATING: 2 (accept)
REVIEWER’S CONFIDENCE: 4 (expert)

The paper discusses and evaluates the performance of a wireless mesh network management system called Afrimesh. The paper first reviews similar systems such as MeshMan, MeshMon, DAMON, etc. and then describes in detail the architecture of the Afrimesh system in terms of the underlying routing protocol, called BATMAN, the three layers comprising the system, and the corresponding interface. The software components at mobile nodes and the system admin node are also listed and briefly described. The second half of the paper describes two simple experiments (unloaded and loaded scenarios) to characterize the performance of the management system and the underlying protocols in terms of signaling overhead, delay of data, throughput and jitter.

The paper is easy to read and follow. However it is long and in most section be can condensed further. For example, the discussion section includes a table (Table II) which is followed considerable text explaining the terms used in the table. The authors need to be more concise and brief in many places.

There are minor typos in the paper and places where acronyms are used before spelling out the terms like OLSR and SSH. The word “co- ordinates” should not include a space, etc. Figures 6 and 7 need to be made readable.

Comments

Firefox in Yoruba Language

Firefox will soon run in Yoruba Language. Efforts are under way to complete our translations and push them to Mozilla central as soon as possible so that people can start using Firefox in Yoruba. If we complete the translations soon enough, we should see Firefox in Yoruba in the group “Localized Versions of Firefox in Testing” with other African languages, such as Zulu, Shongai and Northern Sotho,  in the next release of Firefox.

Join us; there are tonnes of resources out there that you can use. We also recorded our last session. That would help you a great deal to get started. Contact me for the video recording.

Comments

John Visser Talks about Robots

John Visser, a visiting instructor from Netherlands, talked about Robots to our students yesterday. Enjoy!!

Robots

Comments

Software Freedom Day in Gauteng

Interested in some of the presentations at the Software Freedom Day in Gauteng? Here we go:

Hardware for Brewing (Monitoring and Control) and SAGE MATHS

 

Drupal: The Justin Bieber of Open Source CMS

 

E-breadboard – Open Source Decision Intelligence

 

URLs:
http://softwarefreedom.co.za/
http://www.house4hack.co.za/software-freedom-day-phun

Comments

WebRTC: Another Nightmare for Telecom Providers?

I wasn’t going to publish this blog post, until I noticed that Visionmobile and Tmcnet wouldn’t make my comments on their articles available to the public.

What fascinates me is that the authors of the articles (WebRTC May Radically Change Communications, WebRTC: a new game-changer, disrupting Telcos and OTTs) and I think alike. It reminds of the proverb, “Great minds think alike!!.” I was at the Meraka Institute,  Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa, as a visiting researcher last July and gave a talk titled “WebRTC: Another Nightmare for Telecom Providers?”.

Below are the summary and the presentation slides.

Summary:

Web browsers will now use WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) to communicate with one another. WebRTC can also be used to communicate with existing telecommunication networks. As a result, voice services in existing telecommunication networks will likely drop as customers will pay more for data services in order to use WebRTC. In addition, the number of VOIP & IM applications on a PC would likely reduce. WebRTC is a game changer, and it is bound to take some of the market share of voice and data services from the telco operators. This talk will take a look at WebRTC and its potentials. It will also include a short demonstration.

Presentation Slides (in html)
Presentation at CSIR

Presentation at CSIR

Comments (1)

Day 1 & 2 of CPUT FOSHS ’12

CPUT FOSHS ’12 has come and gone. Many thanks to our presenters, supporters and colleagues (Dr. Ernest Pineteh and Wilhelm Rothman) that help organized it. On day 1, Wilhelm Rothman gave an interesting talk on VPN (Virtual Private Network)) and did some demonstrations using OpenVPN.  In addition, I gave a talk on ARM devices. I also did some demonstrations using Pandaboard. Day 2 was for the industry players to come present. All the presenters gave mind-blowing talks, such as Using Chef for System Automation and MongoDB Geospatial. Below are the videos of some of the talks.

Using Chef for System Automation

 

Quick talk on Linux filesystems

 

Some Pictures of the Event

 

Presentation Slides
Herman Smith: MongoDB Geospatial and Android
Jonathan Hitchcock: Using Chef for System Automation
Michael Adeyeye: Playing with ARM devices
Rothman Wilhelm: Towards Virtual Private Networks

Comments (2)

CPUT FOSHS ’12

CPUT Free Open Source and Hardware Symposium

Date: August 2-3, 2012
Venue: Department of Information Technology, Engineering Building, CT Campus

Presentations

  • MongoDB Geospatial and Android

Presenter(s): Herman Smith; Software Developer, Touchlab at Media24, Cape Town.
Time: Fri, 2012-08-03 10:00 Room Location: LH1.19

  • Using Chef for System Automation

Presenter(s): Jonathan Hitchcock; Operations Team Lead, Yola, Cape Town
Time: Fri, 2012-08-03 11:00 …Room Location: LH1.19

  • Quick talk on Linux filesystems

Presenter(s): Hiren Patel ; System Administrator and Freelancer, Cape Town
Time: Fri, 2012-08-03 12:00 Room Location: LH1.19

  • Open Source Software at Motribe

Presenter(s): Bradley Whittington; Ops/Development Manager, Motribe, Cape
Town
Time: Fri, 2012-08-03 13:00 Room Location: LH1.19

©2012 Centre for Research and Development in Open Technology
Contact: adeyeyem{at}cput.ac.za or pinetehe{at}cput.ac.za

URLs:
http://www.ngportal.com/cputfoshs/
http://www.cput.ac.za/about/events/open-source-and-hardware-symposium

Comments

Talks at the Google IO (Extended), Pretoria

Schalk Heunis (Ph.D) and I were invited to the Google IO (Extended) last Thursday to talk on Arduino and arm devices, respectively. The event was an interesting one with participants from the academic environment and the industry. The event took place a day after Google announced the release of Nexus 7, Nexus Q, the Google Event app, and Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). It was all fun, and I thought of recording the talks for anyone that might be interested. I was only able to cover the first part of Schalk’s talk; after it, the recording application started acting up and would not record the second part and my own presentation.

Google-IO 2012

Google-IO 2012

The video file and my slides are below:

1. Schalk’s talk and demo on Arduino (970MB)

2. My slides on arm devices (in .odp.pdf)

I plugged my Pandaboard to a screen and installed Android on it for the audience to see how arm devices work. In addition, I showed a demo of the various mesh telephone projects I am involved in.

Comments