The sixteenth Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 04) is a forum aimed at covering state-of-the-art research and development in real-time computing. The conference was held in Catania, Italy. In conjunction with conference I have also attended RTMM - International Workshop on Real-Time for Multimedia with special focus on Real-time Middleware for Consumer Electronics.

On this workshop I have presented my work which was carried out within the FABRIC project (FABRIC is the European IST project IST-2001-37167). The whole workshop was very interesting for me, thus it has a topic that is really close to my research area.

The workshop addressed the global interoperability aspects while concentrating on delivering standard wide real-time guarantees to provide high quality guaranteed video and audio streaming between devices operating under different middleware standards. Very interesting point of the workshop was a panel discussion. A topic of the panel was to address a number of initiatives, both industrial and academic, in order to provide a solution for communication among networked multimedia devices. I heard a critical view at these initiatives both from the application and research viewpoints. The objective was to identify new possible opportunities and areas in which research has to be reinforced.

The conference offered many interesting papers and presentation. The papers presented can be sort in five categories:
Foundations - theories and models of real-time computing and systems
Applications and Tools - embedded real-time systems; real-time control applications; real-time aspects in ubiquitous computing; distributed real-time information systems/databases; video/audio streaming with real-time constraints; in-home entertainment networks; frameworks and tools for development and analysis.
Software - software architectures and languages; operating systems; design, scheduling, timing and execution-time analysis; validation; monitoring.
Hardware architectures - real-time devices and (co)processors; power-aware RT-computing.
Distributed Systems and Networks: communication protocols; interfaces and compos ability; wireless and ad-hoc networking, real-time mobile computing.

Keynote session offered really useful information about programming in real-time systems. It was presented by Alan Burns (University of York, England).

Thus, my overall impression is that this was very good conference with so many interesting papers and works, which I have to look in for my future work.