Quick Update

Someone asked recently if the lack of blog activity was due to busyness, or a lack of news to report on. I'm happy to report that it is the latter!

One thing I haven't really touched on in my blogging is my research (feel free to tune out now, if that sounds really boring!). The research has been going very well, and the time here has already been far more productive that I had imagined or hoped for. The last month or two (with the interruption of Christmas and New Year) has been a slight digression from my main research programme to look at some interesting aspects of how the Java programming language is used on the modern multicore computer chips that are becoming increasingly common. That was a particularly interesting detour for me as it took me back to relook at some of the work I did for my MSc research a few ;-) years ago now. The results of the digression are quite good, and I have also spent a week or two writing them up as a paper for possible presentation at a conference in Las Vegas just before I am due to return to SA in July.

Speaking of conferences, there are two coming up in March that I am hoping to attend while I am in the USA. The first is the SIGCSE (Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) annual conference, being held in Chattanooga, Tennessee (made famous for its "choo choo" by Glen Miller!). That is the leading international conference on teaching and learning in Computer Science (and Information Systems, for that matter). I have often enjoyed and benefited from reading papers from the conference in the past, so it would be great to attend in person.

The second is the 24th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, being held at Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii. Before anyone leaps to any unjustified conclusions, the venue has no bearing on my interest (well, OK, maybe a little!). One of the streams at this conference is on "Coordination Models, Languages and Applications", which is the area that my research has focused on for the past 14 (or more) years. I was part of the programme committee that reviewed the papers for the conference, so I would really like to go (and if I have to endure the organisers' choice of venue, I guess I can force myself to do so!).

Even being here, the budget for travel, conference fees, etc. is quite hectic (particularly with the R:$ exchange rate at 10:1), so I still need to do my sums to make sure I can do the travelling and still eat for the next few months!