EIFFEL Think Tank Meeting Day1

The first day of our EIFFEL think tank meeting is over. It’s been a good meeting so far with rather positive reactions from attendants. And I am positively surprised by the meeting myself.

Our ‘teaser’ presentations turned out to take most of our time, combining the presentations with discussions, which is a good thing as a starter. A longish debate ignited around the issue of engineering vs science, i.e., the issue of how we conduct our research. While this depiction of ‘vs’ is somewhat controversial, Bob Briscoe later turned this issue more generally to the research style question, i.e., the incentive often found in research to be unique and novel, the lack of failures, and the often lack of debate. Dave Clark aired similar concerns at presentations in the past and it seems an increasing recognition that this might stand in the way of pushing the limits forward.

Apart from this ‘style’ debate, we had a number of very good technical presentations, outlining challenges for the Future Internet, around wireless, management, resource accountability and more. It was a good series to get the following break-out groups going, although there was sometimes a feeling that the bigger picture was somehow missing, i.e., the visions that will push us forward albeit possibly in different directions in the beginning. But I do believe that only these big pictures will allows for distilling THE potential big picture for the future, something that this think tank is somehow chartered with developing over time.

But this is material for the meetings to come. For the first meeting of this kind, it was largely as expected, namely looking for traces that can be used for orientating ourselves for the future meetings. Clearly, the threads of technical challenges, business models and economics as well as trust, privacy and security were falling out as such after the first day. We hope that we manage to work on these more tomorrow, distill the messages we can for a first TT report and then move towards an exciting second meeting early 2009.

Overall I do hope that it has not been seen as a waste by the participants of this meeting, on the contrary. And that would already be a success in itself.