Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
June 17 - 21, 2013

 Sigmetrics Awards

The Best Paper Award and the Ken Sevcik Outstanding Student Paper Award were both given to the following paper:
Queueing System Topologies with Limited Flexibility
John N. Tsitsiklis (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Kuang Xu (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

The Best Practical Paper Award was given to the following paper:
Practical Conflict Graphs for Dynamic Spectrum Distribution
Xia Zhou (UC Santa Barbara), Zengbin Zhang (UC Santa Barbara), Gang Wang (UC Santa Barbara), Xiaoxiao Yu (Tsinghua University), Ben Y. Zhao (UC Santa Barbara), Haitao Zheng (UC Santa Barbara)

The Sigmetrics Lifetime Achievement Award winner is Jean Walrand (EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley). Prof. Walrand will be speaking from 8:30am -- 9:15am on Thursday, 6/20.

Sharing Network Resources Networking is about sharing resources, from sharing links with packet-switching to sharing servers in the cloud with virtual machines and parallel algorithms. Progress is driven mostly by clever inventions. In many cases, modeling and analysis lead to improved schemes. The time and space scales of networks necessitate distributed algorithms.  Analyzing these algorithms often requires new methods for approximating the complex random dynamics and simplifying the objectives of the control schemes. The demand and available resources are determined by users and businesses. Thus, an economic layer interacts with the technology layer. These interactions are governed by relationships between demand, quality, and prices.  These relationships may result from strategic behavior.  As the technology evolves, new problems emerge that raise new challenges for researchers.  In this talk, I review some of the problems that have fascinated me.

The Sigmetrics Rising Star Award winner is Augustin Chaintreau (CS Department, Columbia University). Prof. Chaintreau will be speaking from 5:30pm -- 6:00pm on Wednesday, 6/19.

Information Highway Revisited Social media claims the significant fraction of time - and revenue - that was once dedicated to TV and newspapers, and they also keep our scientists busy. Surprisingly, although we learned a lot about social networks, we still have little formal understanding of why they can indeed be useful; some of us even discuss why researching about them is. To answer both questions positively, this talk follows a natural hypothesis - that social networks can naturally enforce efficient communications - but it claims this vision needs to be revisited. In contrast with a series of classical results, as we quickly reached information abundance, and loss of privacy, we desperately need our friends and communities not to receive more, but to receive less. In an attempt to overview what makes this new research challenge special, this talk presents two recent research results dealing with filtering and privacy in information sharing. Our main results highlight in very different scenarios the need for a potential function that allows the network to stabilize and its users to gain approximately optimal utility. As users greediness and collusions increase, we show a transition where complexity suddenly increases before even the convergence to an equilibrium is jeopardized. We finally motivate more work to be done on the performance evaluation of social networks.

The Sigmetrics Test of Time award goes to the following paper:

Fast accurate computation of large-scale IP traffic matrices from link loads, by Yin Zhang, Matthew Roughan, Nick Duffield, and Albert Greenberg, Sigmetrics 2003.

This award will be presented at the Sigmetrics Banquet, Wednesday evening (6/19).