Archive for May, 2009

ICCCN rejects my paper for publication

The paper was titled “Converged Services in the Web-browsing Context” and was submitted to ICCCN 2009 Track on Internet Services, Systems and Applications (ISSA).ICCCN stands for International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks. With no hard feelings, I accepted the reviewers’ comments. In the academic world, we don’t expect our papers (ideas) to always be accepted. I am glad the ideas seem feasible though.

Below are the reviewers’ comments
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======= TPC Review 1 =======

> *** Recommendation: Your overall rating.
Likely Reject   (top 50% but not in top 35%, needs more work) (2)

> *** Contributions: What are the major issues addressed in the paper? Do you
consider them important? Comment on the degree of novelty, creativity, impact, and
technical depth in the paper.

An architecture for shared web browsing.

> *** Strengths: What are the major reasons to accept the paper? [Be brief.]

The studied topic is important. The proposed architecture gives some nice ideas on
how to design shared browsing services.

> *** Weakness: What are the most important reasons NOT to accept the paper? [Be
brief.]

An implementation is needed to assess the benefits of the architecture

> *** Detailed Comments: Please provide detailed comments that will be helpful to
the TPC for assessing the paper. Also provide feedback to the authors.

The ideas presented in the paper are nicely presented and show a lot of promise.
However, the benefits of the design are not easily concluded from the paper. In
addition, an implementation is necessary for the reader to assess the benefits of he
proposed ideas. The authors need to motivate their design choices.

======= TPC Review 2 =======

> *** Recommendation: Your overall rating.
Likely Reject   (top 50% but not in top 35%, needs more work) (2)

> *** Contributions: What are the major issues addressed in the paper? Do you
consider them important? Comment on the degree of novelty, creativity, impact, and
technical depth in the paper.

The paper looks at converged services looking at allowing traveling web connections.

> *** Strengths: What are the major reasons to accept the paper? [Be brief.]

The paper describes the technical details of the approach in reasonable detail with
regards to most of the underlying messages.

> *** Weakness: What are the most important reasons NOT to accept the paper? [Be
brief.]

The paper does not really have any sort of performance results and is difficult to
follow.  One would have a difficult time reproducing the results despite the paper
being well under the page limit.

> *** Detailed Comments: Please provide detailed comments that will be helpful to
the TPC for assessing the paper. Also provide feedback to the authors.

Intriguing paper with regards to converging web services across multiple devices.
While the topic is interesting, the paper itself is not especially clear.  The paper
needs to do a better job of cleanly delineating where the contribution of the work
is and placing the overall work in the proper context.

Critically, the work falls short in that several details are left quite vague.
While one could focus on just the mechanism, the paper does not really go into much
detail of Section VI, the implementation.  It has a few cursory details which seems
to consist of tada, we did it.  Beyond the earlier discussion, this is what is
interesting to the reviewer.

Were there implementation details that were tricky?  Were there lessons learned that
others could draw upon?  Is the code freely available for download? Are there any
performance results for the work, even just simply demonstrating that it indeed does
work (latency of switching off, etc.)?

As there is plenty of space left over, the authors should take full advantage of the
space to clearly show their work and what they have accomplished.  As it stands now,
there is still a fair amount of work for someone trying to build on their work to
continue forward.

======= TPC Review 3 =======

> *** Recommendation: Your overall rating.
Likely Reject   (top 50% but not in top 35%, needs more work) (2)

> *** Contributions: What are the major issues addressed in the paper? Do you
consider them important? Comment on the degree of novelty, creativity, impact, and
technical depth in the paper.

This paper proposes an implementation plan of internet-based telecommunication-style
communication services including content sharing and session handoff. As documents
of 3GPP adn 3GPP2 show, such features will be important in future web-based
communication services. The service abstracts are presented by event sequence
diagrams and associated explnations.

> *** Strengths: What are the major reasons to accept the paper? [Be brief.]

If implemented, it seems to provide a reference system upon which many research
projects could be performed including the issues of content sharing and session
handoff.

> *** Weakness: What are the most important reasons NOT to accept the paper? [Be
brief.]

The implementation plan alone, as presented in htis paper, cannot be a research
paper at major conferences. Experiences with an implementation and deployment may be
necessary to consider this paper for a conference.

> *** Detailed Comments: Please provide detailed comments that will be helpful to
the TPC for assessing the paper. Also provide feedback to the authors.

An analysis report addressing the performance of such a system would make this paper
much stronger. Or, a report of possible implementation problems would help too.

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