From tao@research.telcordia.com Mon Aug 2 13:48:42 2004 Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 12:14:53 -0400 From: Tao Zhang To: 'A. Bruce McDonald' Cc: 'Tao Zhang' Subject: RE: Invitation to join the organization committee for new international conference Dear Bruce, I talked with Imrich Chlamtac whose CreateNet is financially sponsoring the conference. In general, the registration fee will not be waved for any committee member including myself (IEEE and ACM conferences generally don't wave registration fees for committee members as well). I informed Imrich that you may serve two roles (i.e., the local chair and the chair for the workshops/panels), and he agreed that in this case, he can find ways to reimburse your registration fee. For example, as the local chair, you may need to bring one or two projectors to be used by the conference, and you can be reimbursed for this activity so that effectively you will not pay any registration fee. Does this sound OK? Thanks Tao -----Original Message----- From: Tao Zhang [mailto:tao@research.telcordia.com] Sent: Friday, July 30, 2004 9:15 PM To: 'A. Bruce McDonald' Cc: tao@research.telcordia.com Subject: RE: Invitation to join the organization committee for new international conference Dear Bruce, I appreciate your interest and consideration. The following are responses to your questions and I am looking forward to having you aboard. We are thinking about having the conference at Martha's Vineyard from June 27-29, 2005. No specific site in Martha's Vineyard is identified. We need the help from the Local Chair for this -:)) People currently involved in the conference organization include Imrich Chlamtac (UTD, and CreateNet Research Consortium), P.R. Kumar (UNUC), Songwu Lu and Lixia Zhang from UCLA, Ken Birman and a couple of others from Cornell, P.K. Khosla (CMU), Nim Cheung (Stanford, and running for president of IEEE ComSoc), Marco Ronchetti (U. of Trento, Italy), Bo Li (HKUST, Hon Kong), and many more from the US, Europe, Asia and Canada. The Research Consortium CreateNet led by Imrich Chlamtac is sponsoring this conference and is also providing all the logistics support. By the way, Imrich Chlamtac is the one who started up MobiCom, IEEE Transactions on Networking, ACM/Kluwer Wireless Networks Journal, etc. CreateNet is now sponsoring several new conferences. We are in the processing of discussing with the IEEE about co-sponsorship. The objective is to make the conference a successful annual event (not just a one-year deal) and a top-quality one that will attract the best people in related fields. I expect the conference location to change from year to year. We are thinking about Martha's Vineyard for this first year because we thought that it would be a good idea to have the first conference at a location that is attractive and also convenient for participants from both the US and European. I have not found any other conference of the same nature. There are general networking conferences and conferences that specialize in some specific areas related to collaborative networking, worksharing, and applications. But, I have not seem a conference that provides the forum that this conference intends to provide, i.e., a forum for people in all disciplines closely related to collaborative networking to come together. I would expect that people will send some of the papers that they will otherwise send to other conferences to this conference. But, we do not seem to be in direct competition in any significant way with another existing conference. We are hoping to have both academic and industry participations. As you may know, DARPA and many other federal government agencies are very much interested in this domain. So, we also plan to get some of these agencies involved. It will be excellent if you could help get Samsung involved. As the Local Chair, I am hoping that you could help identify a good conference center and a couple of attractive hotels (that are not too outrageously expensive -))), and provide advice on local customs and other local information such as local transport, etc., For example, as you mentioned: what are the good and bad times -:)). By the way, once a short list of conference centers and hotels are identified, CreateNet will take care of all the price negotiations, paying for the reservations, and all other related logistics support, and we don't have to worry about these. You are absolutely more than welcome to take on other roles in the conference organization. I appreciate your interests. For example, you could join the technical program committee. Yes, we are planning to have a total of 4 workshops and panels. If you are interested, it would be great if you could organize a workshop or a panel. It would be even better if you could serve as the chair for all the workshops and panels. Someone from Europe has agreed to organize a workshop and another person at Telcordia has agreed to organize a panel. So, if you could serve as the workshop/panel chair, you won't be starting from ground zero -:)). Please let me know what roles you would be interested? We have not yet discussed the issues of waving the registration fees for conference organizers. I will look into it and will let everyone know as soon as I have an answer, as well as regarding whether we can get a budget for the Local Chair to travel. I am glad to hear that you had close connections to Telcordia. Yes, you are right, Telcordia was Bellcore. I am at Applied Research and my office is in Piscataway. We were in Morristown. But, all the people in Morristown were moved to Piscataway at the end of last year. We still have some people in NVC. I go there fairly often these days too. Please let know if I missed any of your questions. Let me know if you have any further question at any time. I am looking forward to your joining the fun -:)) Thanks Tao -----Original Message----- From: A. Bruce McDonald [mailto:mcdonald@ECE.NEU.EDU] Sent: Friday, July 30, 2004 3:04 PM To: Tao Zhang Subject: Re: Invitation to join the organization committee for new international conference Dear Tao, Thank you very much for your kind invitation. It certainly sounds interesting. Before I make any committment can you say a little bit more about the logistics---time/place, who is involved in the organizing committee, do you have or plan to get IEEE or ACM to help sponsor the event, what sort of scope, size, quality is the objective, what 'conferences' will you be 'competing' with for top quality papers, what is the mix of academic versus industrial participation that you seek, are there other corporate sponsors (I might be able to interest Samsung in being involved), is there any interest in IETF/IRTF involvement, and FINALLY, what do you expect from and need from the the Local Chair? I would certainly like to help build this and would be most interested if I could be part of the Executive Committee as well; time committment is an issue so I need to have some idea or what is needed from me locally, as well as what travel may be required for the planning committee, etc. With all that I am out of breath! Keep in mind there is right time and a wrong time w.r.t. Martha's Vinyard. It is also *not* an inexpensive place unless you happen to be guests of the Kennedy family (I am sorry to say I have little in the way of connections there :-) ). It does bring to mind the many oceanic, marine and naval applications for sensors. Woods Hole is right on the way and they could also be a possible strategic partner. Just a couple other details... Do you intend to panels, tutorials, etc? Last, but not least, can registration fees be waved for those on the committee, will it always be in the Vinyard (assuming success---no reason not to), and can we expect any travel budget. Better to ask up front. I look forward to your responses and hope to be able to accept your invitation. BTW---what facilty are you working out of? I worked as a visiting researcher on summer at Navesink (Redbank) with Gopal Meempat and also had sponsorship from Bellcore for a portion of my Ph.D. . I love that courtyard Hotel across the street. (I am correct that Telecordia *was* Bellcore once upon a time?) We have not contacted the IETF yet. But, I believe it is a great idea to talk to folks on the IETF to see whether they can get involved in any form. Best regards, Bruce -------------------------------------------------------- A. Bruce McDonald f:617.373.8970 Assistant Prof. v:617.373.3028 ECE Dept., 417 Dana mcdonald@ece.neu.edu 360 Huntington Ave. www.ece.neu.edu/faculty/mcdonald Northeastern University Boston, MA 02115 -------------------------------------------------------- On Mon, 26 Jul 2004, Tao Zhang wrote: > Dear Prof. McDonald, > > We are planning a new international conference that will focus on collaborative networking, workshare, and applications > (including large-scale collaborative ad-hoc and sensor networks). > The objective is to make it a successful annual conference, with the first one (WORKSHARE 2005) being planned for late June of next year > at Martha's Vineyard in > > I am wondering if you would be interested in serving as the local chair for the conference? > > I am looking forward to hearing from you soon. > > Regards > Tao Zhang > Director, Wireless and Mobile Networking Research Group > RRC 1A245 > Telcordia Technologies > One Telcordia Drive > Piscataway, NJ 08854 > 732 699 2459 > tao@research.telcordia.com > >