If I Knew What I Was Doing…

Last week was a good one. To begin with, I learned that the paper I submitted to the Service Research and Innovation Institute 2012 Global Conference was accepted. I have some updates to make, but that’s pretty standard. And I’ve got a couple of extra pages to work with before I hit the page limit, so that’s not a concern.

Second, I met with my dissertation committee on Thursday afternoon to give them an update on my progress and to get any suggestions or course corrections early, with an aim of defending my dissertation in the fall. Well, I met with 3/4 of the committee; one member was on travel and I’ll meet with him one-on-one this coming Wednesday.

I can’t say the dissertation committee meeting was “pleasant,” but it is what I wanted. They put me through a bit of a wringer, but not on my research as such. The bigger issue was that I was not presenting it in the form of “this is a missing area of human knowledge and here’s how I’m going to fill it in.” Instead, I was presenting it partly as “here’s what we talked about a year ago at my proposal defense” (which they didn’t recall) and partly as “here’s the practical use of what I’m doing.”

The latter presentation style is what I deal with day-to-day at work; I’m an engineer and my customers know what their problem is. The reason they’re listening to me is that they want to hear a solution. But academia is a different matter entirely–they want to hear about what the problem is and why previous work hasn’t solved it; any practical considerations are of secondary or tertiary interest. So that’s a definite lesson learned: make the problem statement a huge piece of the discussion right up front.

A pleasant surprise was that the committee seems to think the service description I’ve been working on is a bigger part of my results that I thought. And that’s excellent news for me, as I wasn’t really sure if that was as big a deal as I’d hoped or not.

There was one additional good development: My advisor wants me to begin work on a lengthy paper, sort of a mini-dissertation, that lays out all the work we’ve done over the past year or so, soup-to-nuts, so that we can submit it to a journal (as well as having it serve as a dissertation draft). So I guess I need to add another category to this blog: Dissertation.

The Data-Driven Decision Support and Guidance Systems workshop went well yesterday. I had several interesting conversations with people, both about my own research and about theirs. I also watched my friend Susan Farley present her paper to the workshop. Given that her advisor is one of the organizers, it’s good that her paper was accepted.

Now it’s on to preparing a paper for the conference in Istanbul that my advisor is interested in. I also want to prepare a few more as backups so I make sure I have enough publications to complete my dissertation this year. Oh, and I also need to actually complete my research an get my prototype built and running.

I’m mostly done with the paper I was working on for the Annual SRII Global Conference. Now I’m just waiting for comments from my advisor before I submit it. It had been due on February 29, but early on the 28th they announced the deadline was being extended by popular request. The new deadline is March 15. So for now, I’ve set the paper aside for a few days. I’ll review it again after it’s mellowed for a little while. I find it helpful to walk away from something for a little while and then re-read it after being away from it. I often find new things that I didn’t see earlier, and the end result is a better product.

Now I’m on the hunt for another publishing opportunity. One more in the bag (assuming the SRII paper gets accepted) and I should be in a position to put my dissertation together and start working on my defense. In the meantime, I’ve got to prepare my poster presentation for the DGSS workshop on . . . → Read More: Another Paper Done

I’ve been working on integrating social media into my service composition work. My advisor suggested it as a way to add a little more kick to the work. I’m sure the fact that he’s teaching a class on social networks this semester has a little something to do with it as well.

The concept is pretty easy — find the pages for service providers on a social network, mine the information available to make a judgment about how that provider compares to others. I expected the hard part to be learning the APIs well enough to retrieve the information from the networks. Oddly enough, it seems that’s the easy part. The hard part is finding APIs for the various networks.

I decided to start with the 800 pound gorilla of social networking, Facebook. There’s an excellent and dead-simple API called RestFB that does everything I need and is easy to use. But because I”m (nominally) working with business services, I thought that looking to sites devoted to business reviews would be a good next step. Yelp was not a disappointment; they also have an easy-to-use search API. (These are both REST APIs, but are easy to use with thick . . . → Read More: Getting Social

I met with my advisor about 10 days ago as the new semester started, and we discussed adding social network aspects to the paper I’m working on for the SRII Conference. So I’ve spent some time learning the APIs for Yelp and Facebook (as a start).

The good news is that the APIs don’t seem all that complex. Well, the Yelp API isn’t that complex; I haven’t worked with the Facebook API enough to make a judgment. Complicating the fact is that I’m writing thick client Java code, and these apps are both built on the assumption that it is other web sites that will be using their applications. The practical effect is that the responses I get are JSON objects that I’ll need to parse if I want to get at the information of interest to me. Not necessarily a difficult task, just a pain.

But I am making progress, so that’s a . . . → Read More: Another Learning Curve

I got the update to my paper for the DGSS12 conference completed and submitted, along with all of the associated copyright paperwork. and shortly after that, I learned the abstract I submitted to the Annual Service Research & Innovation Institute Global Conference was accepted. Granted, it’s not a publication. But it is a ticket to the dance, so to speak. Now I jsut need to do enough research to compile a worthy paper by February 29.

Toward that end, I met with my advisor this afternoon to discuss the direction the paper is going. We were generally thinking of the same things, but he did have an interesting idea to apply some social networking ideas that may offer enough novelty to make the paper very attractive to the reviewers (assuming I can pull it off). Even better, when I asked him how close I was to being done, he initially hedged his comments and told me that if I was diligent I should be able to graduate in May. By “diligent” I’m pretty sure he meant “if you work your @$$ off.” That was way more than I expected; I thought he’d say I have to work hard to finish . . . → Read More: Another Glimmer of Hope

A little over a week ago I received notification that my paper was accepted for the 28th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshop on Data-Driven Decision Support and Guidance Systems (hereinafter referred to as DGSS). The notification was a couple of days late, but the comments weren’t too bad, so I updated my paper and sent them the camera-ready copy this past Monday.

Another one down, two or three more to go! (I’m trying to make sure I’ve got plenty of padding in the publications department.)

But now the semester is over, and I still need to update my committee members on my progress. I supposed I’ll have to type something u pto send them, but I really need to sit down with them in the spring.

In the meantime, it’s back to work on defining a service . . . → Read More: Another One Down

I spent the weekend working on my prototype implementation using some service agents I had kicking around from previous work. I added a “graph agent” that collects information from the various service agents and assembles them into a directed graph for further analysis. Building the initial graph turned out to be pretty easy. There’s a very easy-to-use directed graph library called JGraphT that made the task pretty simple.

Now comes the hard part: verifying that the graph is correct. The easiest way to do that is to see it, so I followed the recommendation on the JGraphT site and downloaded the JGraph library. It’s a commercial product, but it does have a free license for non-commercial use.Unfortunately, the latest version (called JGraphX) doesn’t have a simple importer for the latest version of JGraphT, but the previous version, JGraph v5, still works pretty seamlessly wiht JGraphT. It wasn’t too hard to get the graph to display in a window, but figuring out how to do it with a reasonably useful layout is proving tricky. By default, it lays out with all of the vertices stacked on top of each other. But it is a start.

Now I need to troubleshoot why the . . . → Read More: Well, it’s a Graph…