2001-01-10

1. Location

The RTCSA conference was held at Cheju KAL Hotel, Cheju Island, Korea, between December 12 and December14 2000. The conference was held in conjunction with the Swedish – Korean Real-Time workshop held on December 10 and December 11, 2000. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the workshop.

2. RTCSA

My expectations for the conference were hard to define since this was my first attendance at a Real-Time conference, but as a general conclusion, the experience was very good. I gave a talk on the last day of the conference about a paper I wrote together with my supervisor, Gerhard Fohler, and the feedback was helpful. I meet a lot of people from all over the world who are working in the field of Real-Time Systems and the conversations with them was really useful. As a negative remark, I think the organization of the conference could have been better. Some of the talks were hard to attend since the conference was held in parallel sessions.

One of the most popular topics discussed at the conference was scheduling, which is also my field since I am involved in a project in the area of flexible and predictable timing constraints. There were a lot of interesting presentations but, unfortunately, some of them were hard to follow because of language difficulties some of the speakers had. J. Ng et al. wrote an interesting paper about designing a multi server for a distributed MPEG video system with streaming support and QoS control which is of our interest since we are developing a similar multimedia application in a project that involves the master students at the Department of Computer Engineering at MDH. C. Ngan presented an interesting paper about Real-Time video player systems. A presentation related to my own field was given by James Anderson about Pfair scheduling in which he presents an algorithm for scheduling intra-sporadic tasks. The paper is interesting for me because in my future work I will consider the derivation of fixed priorities, periods and offsets for tasks with complex constraints (instance separation, jitter).

As an overall evaluation, I think it was useful to attend the conference and I am looking forward to attend (and contribute to) the next one that will be held in Japan in December 2001.