the end

We're getting to the end of this project. It has been very informative for me and I hope for you as well. Nick Feamster came to my attention by winning the 2008 NSF Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. As the title of the award indicates it is still very early in Nick Feamster's career. His website indicates that he is still very active in the research of computer systems and we can look forward to many more important contributions from him. Also from his website and CV we can get an indication of how important Nick will be to the future with his teaching and recruitment interests. Articles such as Can great research be taught? Independent research with cross-disciplinary thinking and broader impact (ACM/SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2008) indicate that he thinks of his teaching career as more than a means to conduct his research.

To wrap up the blog I wanted to add a list of resources that I have come across/sought out in researching this assignment.
Organizations:
ACM, offers many special interest groups - SIGCOMM is the one Nick Feamster is a member of
Student memberships are available with or without access to their digital library (highly recommended if entering the field)
USENIX the advanced computing systems association (proceedings available freely online)
IEEE - professional organization for the advancement of technology. Also a prolific publisher.
Computing Research Association their mission is to advance education and research in computer related fields
International Telecommunication Union (ITU - formerly CCITT) fostering telecommunications on a global level
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
American Association for the Advancement of Science (membership includes subscription to Science)
American Mathematical Society furthers the interest of mathematics research and scholarship
Scholarly Societies has a list of organizations under the field of computer science

Websites to explore:
ACM, USENIX, and IEEE all have libraries online (accessibility may depend on membership)
Virtual Technical Reports Center, E-prints, PrePrints, and Technical Reports on the web has links to institutions that provide reports of all kinds
CiteSeerX "is a scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science."
arXiv operated by Cornell University "is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear service, computer science, quantitative biology & statistics."
Scitopia a search portal for patents and scholarly sources in science and technology
DSpace is MIT's institutional repository
US-CERT: United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team- information on cyber security
NIST Computer Security Resource Center
Stony Brook Algorithm Repository a collection of algorithm implementations
Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures
Programmer's heaven a collection of resources for programmer's

For the newbie you may want to start at:
Science.gov government science information
Charles Babbage Institute - Center for the history of computing
Computer History Museum
Matisse's glossary of Internet terms
Foldoc: Free online dictionary of computing
ComputerUser.com

There are many scholarly databases to check out if you can get access:
ISI (Web of Science)
Scopus
ScienceDirect from Elsevier
Inspec
Compendex
Safari
Knovel

Class Questions

Just a short blog to specifically address the unanswered questions this assignment was/is supposed to answer.
A complete description of Nick Feamster's research can come directly from his website, more specifically on his research statement.
As for patterns in literature use, where systematically looking for information, and where serendipitously looking? I think these all sort of blend together. Nick's CV shows a great deal of activity in various conferences, symposiums, and workshops. The proceedings of these conferences are reflected in his citations. There are some organizations that he is more involved with (ACM and SIGCOMM for instance) and awareness of what is going on in these areas will be heightened. But because computer science is such a large field with one area impacting another it is important to be somewhat aware of what is going on in the various sub-disciplines.

Social networking participation? Beyond the physical or live networking experience at all those conferences/symposiums/workshops/etc. Nick both twitters and shares his bookmarks (through delicious).

Is his citing information open access?
Many of the sources are trying to allow access to all, or at least to their members.

more citations and other info

Today I thought I would check out Google's Patent search. I know from Nick Feamster's CV that he has an application for, "Method and system design for detecting and responding to attacking networks" US Patent application #11/538,212. Besides finding that I ended up stumbling across more citation information. 2 other US patent applications cited work done by Nick Feamster. The 1st "Systems methods and devices for managing routing" US Pat. 11/270843 cited 4 of his articles. They were:

-Detecting BGP configuration faults with static analysis which appeared May of 2005 in Proc. 2nd Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI)

-Design and implementation of a routing control platform also from May of 2005 in Proc. 2nd Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI) SIGMETRICS

-A model of BGP routing for network engineering from June of 2004 in Proc. ACM SIGMETRICS

-The case for separating routing from routers from September 2004 in ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Future Directions in Network Architecture

The other patent for "Method for Managing a streaming media service" cited, Field-to-Frame transcoding with temporal and spatial downsampling from October of 1999 in IEEE International Conference on Image Processing

All of these articles are available from the publications part of Nick's website. This brings up the question - Can you get all of his articles from there? There are many available there, but some aren't; for instance the article, Can great research be taught? Independent research with cross-disciplinary thinking and broader impact, caught my attention. This can be found in March of 2008's ACM SIGCSE [special interest group on computer science education] Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. If you are a member of ACM you can access all of their materials for free. I'm not so I can't.

Many of the other sources Nick publishes in can be accessed either directly from websites (either his or the organization's in which it was published). USENIX for instance is open access to all.

citation search

Today I checked out ISI' s products. I started with their Cited Reference Search where a number of articles by N Feamster were cited at least once and a few around ten times. I had a little difficulty with this search because even with the article titles expanded they were still abbreviated in a manner I did not recognize.
I moved on to Journal Citation Reports which is where I was reminded of how huge the field of computer science can be. Under the subject search for computer science there were these subdivisions: Artificial Intelligence, Cybernetics, Hardware & Architecture, Information Systems, Interdisciplinary, Software Engineering, and Theory & Methods. Notice no subcategory for networking which is what category I think of when looking over his work. Under Theory and Methods I did find at # 26 the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking which is where the article Stable Policy Routing with Provider Independence was published.
Somewhat irked by the lack of sources Nick Feamster publishes in I tried another track. Still in Journal Citation Reports I looked under Journal titles and brought up the list. While there are a number of ACM and IEEE publications listed, ACM SIGCOMM or SIGMETRICS (or Proceedings of ....) is not listed. These are where most of his work is published.
I had better luck with Scopus which is weird because I don't have access to it. Just using the Author Preview option (and not expecting to get anywhere) I retrieved a lot of info. Under Nick Feamster I found his author id, his h index (4), his publication range (1999-2008), and affiliation history (MIT and Hewlett Packard Laboratories). Things I could see but would need a subscription to get full access to were:
References 393 (his references)
Cited by 77
Co-authors 37
web search 28 (web results, since I couldn't access this I don't know how accurate a search this was)
I liked both ISI and Scopus. These are great resources if you know of a person working in a specific area. I think the main reason the results were so different for my search was due to the journals these resources track.

Other Associations

Last post I discussed ACM, this post I thought I would go into some of the other computing related organizations that I have come across during this research.

USENIX, the Advance Computing Systems Association is another professional society Nick Feamster participates in. According to their website these are their goals:

• to foster technical excellence and innovation
• to support and disseminate research with a practical bias
• provide a neutral forum for discussion of technical issues
• encourage computing outreach into the community at large

To achieve these goals USENIX sponsors a number of conferences, symposiums and workshops. Those interested in the field are encouraged with their student program which offers student memberships and discounts. They also actively encourage students to submit papers with a cash prize. This was won by Nick Feamster at the 10th and 11th USENIX security Symposiums for the papers titled Dos and Don'ts of Client Authentication on the Web and Infranet: Circumventing Web Censorship and Surveillance.
Conference proceedings are available for free through USENIX's online library and papers are refereed. The 'call for papers' links provide specific submission requirements.

Other associations are:
IEEE which formerly was known as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. but evolved beyond its initials because of the multidisciplinary nature of its participants. Also has conferences, numerous publications and student memberships.
NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) "an educational and operational forum for the coordination and dissemination of technical information related to backbone/enterprise networking technologies and operational practices."Also conferences, programs, mailing list,...

Association

In looking over the list of published works Nick Feamster has a large number of them appear in the Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM. What is this?

ACM stands for the Association for Computing Machinery and according to their website is "the world's largest educational and scientific computing society" which "delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession. ACM provides the computing field's premier Digital Library and serves its members and the computing profession with leading-edge publications, conferences, and career resources."

ACM's web page on Rights and Responsibilities does a good job describing the expectations that readers, authors, reviewers, editors, program chairs and committees, and even libraries have of (and from) each other. This page describes what everyone can expect in ACM's publication process, a confidential review process.

What about the SIGCOMM part?

SIGCOMM is one of the many special interest groups that make up ACM. "ACM's special interest groups off er a wealth of conferences, publications, and activities on the local to global scale, providing unlimited opportunities for sharing technical expertise and first-hand knowledge of the latest development trends."
In this case SIGCOMM is the Special Interest Group on Data Communication which includes the areas of network research, standards, and history.

So with Nick's work being primarily in the network area it makes sense that his group's work appears mostly within SIGCOMM. However since the field is so interconnected there is no doubt that they are keeping up with the proceedings of other groups.

Article analysis

Today we're looking at an article on Path splicing that appears in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM [more on that later] in August of '08. This is one of the articles that is available through Nick Feamster's website.

This article was written with Mutaza Motiwala, Megan Elmore, and Santosh Vempala. Motiwala and Elmore are students of his while Santosh Vempala is a fellow professor at Georgia Tech's College of Computing/School of Computer Science. Vempala is the Director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center and Think tank. The article is on the design and evaluation of path splicing and on where this can be applied.

Looking at the References for the article they are predominantly conference and symposium works. There are a few Internet drafts [Internet drafts are exactly that- drafts of articles that appear on the Internet. They are not necessarily in final form and have not been formerly published, work may still be ongoing]. Also used are a few white papers [a marketing tool used to explain a new product. They could contain how the product/technology was developed, evaluated, and where the product can be best used. White papers may include or accompany FAQs and Spec sheets].

I was surprised by the presence of a few works from early in the decade. In the rapidly changing technology field I would think that anything over a year old would be outdated. This would explain the heavy use of conference papers and the use of Internet drafts and white papers. These would be the sources for the latest work and developments. The older works were mentioned in the Related work section, where they surveyed "related work in three areas- multihoming and mulitpath routing, fast recovery schemes, and overlay networks" (Section 3). So the older works were used to evaluate ideas that had already come up.

the homepage

The amount of information found on Nick Feamster's web page is almost staggering. Along with the basics (contact and school information) he has provided links to his curriculum vitae (CV), published works (with links to most of the articles), and lists of students and courses (with links to the syllabus) taught. Also included are his bookmarks, through Delicious the social bookmarking site, and Twitter. Today I took a look at his research statement also available through his web page.

Nick Feamster's research is in real-world solutions to network problems and issues using a principled approach. Meaning finding applications to current hassles and headaches with "provable properties and solid theoretical backing".

According to his research statement there are 3 themes to his work:

1) "Designing inherently robust and resilient networks", referring to work on improving network accountability (reasons for failure or performance loss) and reliability (keeping it running well).

2) "Defending against unwanted traffic", referring to Spam filtering. Who wants spam? The approach here is rather than trying to filter the contents of an email, filter on how the email was sent. "In other words, examine the network-level behavior of the email sender and classify the spam based on whether the observed sending behavior likely corresponds to a legitimate spammer."

3) "Improving fault detection and diagnosis" by analyzing configurations before going live. After deployment, improve the data operators use to pinpoint problem areas.

Next we'll take a look at a published work.

Who is Nicholas Feamster?

Nick Feamster is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He recently won one of the 2007 National Science Foundation's Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). His work involves several aspects of computer networking.

What is this?

This Blog is set up to study the research methodology of Nick Feamster.
Why?
To find out how he and his team find the information used in their research and what they do with it. The idea is to study the research methods of someone working in the field so people entering the field or just curious about it can learn where or how to find information in it.