The SRII conference is over and I’m headed back east. In only wish the airports in Virginia were open all night so I didn’t have to wait for the redeye to make it home. I wouldn’t mind landing at 1AM. If the research forum had been Thursday I’d already be home.

The conference went well. Vint Cerf wasn’t there in person but sent a short video message. Some of the other speakers were excellent, as were some of the panels. My only real complaint is the fact that so many supposedly intelligent people can’t tell time. If you’re scheduled to speak for 20 minutes and your talk runs for 30 minutes, you need to get your act together and adjust your spiel to fit within the allotted time. It’s damned inconsiderate to the other speakers, and it makes it very difficult for the audience to coordinate other responsibilities and still see the items that are of interest to them. And there’s just no excuse for the conference organizers to start a given day’s proceedings late. Maybe I just spent too much time in the Corps and expecting people to be on time is asking for too much.

The highlight of the whole thing for me was probably a talk on emerging research trends. The speaker mentioned the idea of  “everything as a service,” which included people. That reinforced my feeling that my research into a common metamodel for describing such any type of service in a fashion comparable to a web service is valuable.

It did get a chance to talk to some other researchers working on related work, and that’s always a good thing. But it will be even better to get back home to the family.