Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC)

Election for Technical Committee Chair

Ballot: TCCC is holding an election for the position of TC Chair for the term of 2008 through 2009.

Position statements from each candidate are enclosed. Please vote for no more than one candidate:

Candidates for TC Chair:

______Kevin Curran

______Hrishikesh Gossain

______Mehrdad S. Sharbaf

______Burkhard Stiller

OR ______(write-in candidate)

Your Signature:

(Signature not necessary for email returns.)

Your Name (please print):

Your IEEE CS Membership Number:

Only IEEE CS members are eligible to vote. Your membership number is required for a valid ballot.

Please email (highly preferred), fax, or mail your ballot to John Daniel at:

Email:

Fax: +1 202 728 0884

Mail: 1828 "L" Street, NW, Suite 1202, Washington, DC20036-5104, USA

Ballots must be received at the IEEE Computer Society

no later than 20 May 2008

______

Candidate for TCCC Chair

Kevin Curran BSc (Hons), PhD, MBCS CITP, SMIEEE, MACM, MIEE, FHEA

Computing and Intelligent Systems Department

University of Ulster

E-mail:

Position Statement

The IEEE Communications Society’s prestigious reputation is without equal in the field of computer communications the world over. A core aspect of the society is the Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) which aims to provide members with a forum promoting technical discussions and interactions on topics in the general area of communications. I believe that I can contribute as a TCCC chair due to my strong track record in research publications within the field of computer communications and networks. I also believe myself to be a team player, easy to get on with, hard working, diligent and fair. These traits can be seen as desirable in a TCCC chair. I am constantly aware that there are more gifted researchers working in this field however I do believe that my hard working and sense of fair play would forever serve to strengthen the TCCC, energize each new member, seek out new opportunities and arrange innovative tutorials. I believe that I am practical and I would strive to seek where changes could be suggested to the committee to support each members research activity in a bid to offset the bureaucratic duties that are increasingly placed upon us by our host institutions.

Bio

Kevin Curran is a senior member of the IEEE and has published over 300 research papers to date and 5 books in the field of distributed computing especially emerging trends within networks, dynamic protocol stacks and middleware. He has also been involved in attracting UK, European Union and other international grants. He has been the recipient of numerous awards for research and enterprise and is listed in Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, Dictionary of International Biography and Who’s Who in the World. Dr Curran is the team leader of the Ambient Intelligence group at the University of Ulster. He is the Editor in Chief of the forthcoming International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence (IJACI) from IGI Global. He is also a member of the Editorial Committee of 15+ journals and numerous IEEE international conferences. Dr. Curran also has a track record of successfully initiating technology spinout companies. He is a regular contributor to local and national radio and TV news and documentaries especially with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) where he has contributed regularly to network, security and general internet related issues which make the news from time to time.

______

Candidate for TCCC Chair

Hrishikesh Gossain

Position Statement

Technical Committee in Computer Communications (TCCC) is a unique forum which can provide the framework and direction to make the dream of anytime, anywhere come true.The area of Computer Communications has been and will be an evolving field. We now envision a futuristic scenario with not only infrastructure and cellular systems, but also with mobile ad hoc and sensor networks and their co-existence.In addition to addressing the technical aspects of designing, implementing, and evaluating upcoming communication systems, I believe that the TCCC should also address the critical issues related to capacity planning, system scalability, interference modeling, power save, reliability, and security. The global collaboration between academia and industry communities across multiple disciplines is fundamental to promote innovation. If elected, I will promote international activities including conferences, workshops and symposiums where the research community can share their results and open up new opportunities for collaboration and innovation. I will encourage the knowledge sharing between different standards organization and encourage more collaboration between the research community and the industry practitioners. I believe that it is important to periodically examine, and expand or consolidate when appropriate, the conferences, symposiums, and workshops currently sponsored by TCCC or co-sponsored with other technical committees, to ensure broader participation and to reflect the changes in the field. In addition, I will also seek innovative and effective ways to maintain the technical leadership of our TCCC members and promote more interaction and collaboration.

Bio

Hrishikesh Gossain is a Senior Systems Staff Engineer in Mesh Networks Product Group at Motorola Inc. He received his PhD degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, where he won the honorable Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for the year 2004/2005. Earlier he received his BE degree in Electronics Engineering from Motilal Nehru Regional Engineering College, India, where he was undergraduate gold-medalist of the college. He is the recipient of 2007 and 2006 Outstanding Performance Award, Motorola Corporate Standards for his contribution to IEEE 802.11 standards body. He has several approved and pending patents in the areas of wireless and mobile networks, access network design, QoS, and e-media and authored several journal and conference papers in the same. He has served as a Guest Editor to Wireless Communication Magazine and as a TPC member to several international conferences. He has previous work experience with Nortel Networks in Richardson, Texas and the Center for Development of Telematics (C-DoT), India.

______

Candidate for TCCC Chair

Mehrdad S. Sharbaf

Sharbaf & Associates

Position Statement

The mission statement of the Technical Committee on Computer Communications is to provide its members with a forum that promotes technical discussions and interactions on topics in the general area of Computer Communications, as well as to give them the opportunity to broaden their professional contacts through interactions with peers. If elected, I will promote the mission statement of the committee, and enhance the TCCC’s goal to promote global and international technical activities. To make TCCC more useful to its members, it has to present technical knowledge to its members more efficiently through an active web site. I will establish the TCCC to act as a bridge between the research community and the industry practitioners. I also would like to promote the TCCC’s goal, to provide the members with a vehicle through which they can contribute to and influence the direction of research and engineering in computer communication discipline.

Bio

Mehrdad S. Sharbaf background included more than fifteen year's experience in industry and academic environments, focusing on system integration, reengineering information processing, hardware infrastructure, designing information technology, perform systems-level trade studies, design review preparation and system testing, consulting, researching, teaching, and training. Academically, Mehrdad has a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering emphasizing in computer communications networking, and working on his Ph.D. degree in information systems discipline at NovaSoutheasternUniversity. He has gained more than 15 years of teaching experience at various educational institutions such as UCLA Extension, Loyola Marymount University (LMU), CSULB, CSULA, DeVRYUniversity, and NationalUniversity. Prior to establishing his consulting business, Mehrdad spent more than 11 years as a senior staff at Teledyne Electronics Technologies. At Teledyne he received a corporate award for reengineering information process within manufacturing environment to achieve business objectives. He is the founder of Sharbaf & Associates firm. His consulting firm is specializing in Enterprise Network Design, Network Security, and Strategy Management Technology and Innovation. He is an active senior member of IEEE Society, and participating in various events. His research interests are in computer systems security, computer communications networking, quantum information networks, quantum cryptography, and quantum information processing. Mehrdad also is a member of ACM, and AIS.

______

Candidate for TCCC Chair

Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller

University of Zürich, Switzerland

Lab Director Department of Informatics, IFI and Communication Systems Group

CSG

Position Statement

The work TCCC has performed in recent years includes a number of areas within the networking domain, which are essential and highly important for a future research as well as operations perspective. Thus, the fostering of TCCC of research conferences, the education of students (master level as well as Ph.D. level), and an open idea and information exchange between interested people from academia, industry, and SMEs will be the key. Communications and networking in terms of wired and wireless technologies determines the major pillar for today’s information technology-driven society, which can be seen by starting at ATMs for cash withdraws and not ending at pure data communications for distributed simulations of weather or earthquake scenarios.

Therefore, it is a great privilege and honor to be nominated for the position of the TCCC chair. Taking the next steps of communications and networking into account, the TCCC shall try to focus on 2 to 3 areas of interest in the short term. Of course, since technology shifts happen frequently and fast, an ongoing consideration and careful technology-watch has to be

implemented within TCCC to be able to detect early trends and changes. Nevertheless, as a starting point the telecommunications and Internet convergence has to be supported by the right set of mechanisms. These ones include besides pure technology-internal areas, such as access management, accounting, and security support (authentication, authorization, and electronic identity provisioning), also technology-operational areas, such as management functions for an efficient network operation, traffic management functionality, and operations dimensions of converged networking infrastructures.

In this context, the TCCC should focus on mechanisms and management approaches for wired and wireless networking technologies, which will make these converged infrastructures easier to manage. Second, there is a clear demand from “application domains” to intensify the direct support and benefit of such mechanisms and management approaches for applications of communications. There is a high probability that in a number of application domains the set of services offered on top of these converged networks will be only possible due to these novel service management paradigms. Of course, a general approach is always the path to research for, however, it may be quite specific to some sectors, such as e-health, where security and service management are absolutely interrelated, while in infotainment accounting and management for

good qualities are highly interrelated. Thus, such an outline of tasks to be address will make TCCC relevant to industry professionals. Therefore, TCCC should try to develop new initiatives or support workshops in those areas focusing on communication infrastructures in specific domains, where an impact of new communication approaches will be high.

Bio

Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller received his diploma degree in computer science and his doctoral degree from the University of Karlsruhe, in 1990 and 1994, respectively. From 1991 until 1995 he has been a Research Assistant at the University of Karlsruhe, being on leave in 1994/95 for a one-year EC Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, UK. From November 1995 he has been with the Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory, TIK of ETH Zürich. He was appointed Assistant Professor for Communication Systems at ETH in 1999 and held that post until September 2004. Burkhard Stiller held additionally from April 2002 until August 2004 a Full Professor Chair at the University of Federal Armed Forces Munich (UniBwM), where he headed the Information Systems Laboratory IIS and had a part-time appointment with ETH Zurich. Since September 2004 Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller holds the

Communications Full Professor Chair at the University of Zürich, Department of Informatics, IFI and is associated with the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (DITET) of the ETH Zürich. He participated in or managed several national research projects within Germany, Switzerland, and the UK as well as European IST projects, such as Akogrimo, Daidalos, EC-GIN, Daidalos II, MMAPPS, Moby Dick, CATI, M3I, ANAISOFT, DAMMO, DaCaPo++, BioLANCC, and F-CSS. Bilateral industrial collaborations include the BioLANCC, DAMMO, and DAMMO II projects.

Prof. Stiller organized a.o. the DSOM'99 (Distributed Systems — Operations and Maintenance) work-shop as PC Co-chair in Zürich and he served as the general chair for the Networked Group Communications (NGC’03) and Internet Charging and QoS Technologies (ICQT’03) Workshop in September 2003 in Munich. He was a.o. PC Chair of the IEEE LCN'03 Conference in Bonn, General Chair of the 30th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (IEEE LCN’05). More recent he was the TPC Co-chair for NOMS 2006 (10th IEEE/IFIP Network and Operations Symposium), the TPC Co-chair of KiVS 2007 in Berne, of the IEEE ICC Symposium on Network Services and Operations 2007, Glasgow, and General Co-chair of the IEEE BoD Workshop 2006, San Francisco. Recently, he was the General Co-chair of the IEEE BoD Workshop 2008, Salvador, Brazil. He performed as a reviewer for numerous journals (e.g., IEEE

JSAC, Computer Communications, Netnomics) and conferences (e.g., ACM SIGCOM,

Globecom, IEEE Infocom).

Prof. Stiller’s main research interests include charging and accounting for IP-based networks, economics of IP services, grid services, auctions for services, communication protocols in the Internet, biometric access control, Quality-of-Service aspects, peer-to-peer systems, network management, and supporting functions for wireless access networks including biometrics. He published well over 70 research and survey papers on these areas in leading IEEE journals (IEEE JSAC, IEEE Network) and others (e.g., ACM CCR, Netnomics, Computer Communications), IEEE conferences (e.g., IEEE/IFIP NOMS and IM, LCN) and others, and workshops (e.g., IEEE LANMAN, QofIS, Networking, and Global Grid Forum). Finally, he edited a number of specialissues for journals, serves as an editorial board member in Netnomics, PIK, JNMS, and CMS, and served as an editor on books in the areas of network management and Quality-of-Service.