EE vs CS conferences

I am an EE major who woke up one day in a research lab that speaks computer science. Totally baffled by the difference in not just the topics studied, but also methodologies, 15 months later I am still trying to make sense of this new world. Here I want to pick up a specific topic about difference in importance of conferences, their rankings and how does one go about finding good work on a topic.

Disclaimer 1: the following are still early views and I might be wrong in my inferences, would be more than happy to be corrected and/or enlightened more.
Disclaimer 2: My only exposure close to CS has been in networking. So though I am generalizing to CS, I really can only mean "networking conferences"

While admitting that both my graduate stints (in EE and ECE) have been very short, I never sensed a strong focus on a few specific conferences. I saw people around me going to ICC, VTC, globecom, icassp, asilomar (and some to allerton, ciss etc) but it was never a very big prestige issue to go to one or the other, nor did a very strict hierarchy exist amongst these venues. Probably Wiopt and ISIT were the more differentiated ones, because of their focus on a smaller, specialized community on optimization and Info theory respectively. I even saw some good sensor networking researches choosing conferences by the tourism value their venue offered, with a goal to cover all continents (with the possible exception of Antartica) before they graduated! Whenever the work was not purely physical layer or signal processing, I did see people targeting towards Infocom, Mobicom etc and my advisor fretted enough about one Infocom submission to give my present CS colleagues respectable competition. But then I would like to believe that in such situations we had already crossed over to the CS world, so this phenomenon was expected.

In comparison, Computer scientists have their Sigcomms, Nsdis, CoNexts, Sigmetrics, Mobicoms etc and most work outside is treated as invisible. People debate endlessly (as here) on rankings. Whether infocom is Tier-I or Tier-II is discussion-worthy, apparently it is not good to know that its worth looking at, it has to be neatly classified into good, better or best. Complicated combinations of statistics like single track vs multiple track, number of submissions, acceptance ratios, author-to-attendees ratio are crunched to spit out these rankings. Conference statistics and ranking sites abound for CS conferences (like Kevin Almeroth's site, wikipedia article listing conferences by ranking, this blog post and even citeseer's impact factor calculations) but i couldn't find any equivalents for EE.

Is the problem that EE doesn't have any clearly very good conferences (Why?) or is it just a lack of classification. A CS colleague expounded that journals were the real thing in EE with conferences not being of the highest importance, with it being the opposite in CS. Actually I do respect the better-defined methodology and stricter quality control of CS conferences which simplifies a reader's task by giving hints on which papers to read when there are many to choose from. On the contrary ICC, globecom etc with their high 35-45% acceptance rates, 1000 paper conferences and some papers which are totally junk or near 80% plagiarised from previous work make it very difficult to find the gems among the chaff. The EE community has some lessons to learn from their CS counterparts!

On highways and information super-highways

Warning: The reason I've never been able to write blogs (or many emails) is that my mind often races ahead of my typing skills (today it definitely did). But I have thought about this topic so much in the past couple of years and esp in the last couple weeks, that I had to put it down, whatever snatches of ideas I could retain, before they shimmered away again! Apologies for the abrupt, incomplete writing. love to hear thoughts/ideas ..
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Communication networks are like roads. The functions of both can be described as "access" and "connectivity". Simplistically put, roads provide access to material and networks provide access to information. Both are essential for economy and development. But the models in which each is delivered today is very different. Governments build roads using public tax money whereas networks are singularly a business idea. Why this difference? If they were to be the same, one has to change:

First option: Can roads be a private service? Possibly with differentiated QoS (Quality of service!) for different users? I can pay a higher monthly rental to get a 2 Mbps instead of a 256 kbps connection. Could highways be multiple lanes such that one pays more to use a carpool-type fast lane? Is the issue is such a model in

A) Administration? It will be a logistical nightmare to track and charge every user for their usage? Or is it becoming more possible with modern day technologies, like RFIDs, Near Field Communication, Personal area networks (bluetooth etc)?

B) Is it a social issue? The right to movement and "physical connectivity" is so fundamental that it can't be left to the motives of a private enterprise? If left, it would create bigger chasms, rich getting richer, poor, poorer?

The hypothesis B above gives rise to the other option. If we believe that these "information superhighways" are going to become as fundamental a right as the highways of today, should all communication networks be built, owned and operated out of the public-tax money? And should they be openly and freely accessible to every citizen? The need for a patroling and policing system would inevitably follow. The traffic police of the information networks. Or would net-usage etiquette become as ingrained as a driving etiquette.

Will update this post as the thought crystallizes more ..

NGO Post: Interact to Impact!

NGO Post emerged from the many precious discussions I have had with Nitin, a PhD student at UCSD and a fellow believer in the power of technology to facilitate social change. Both Nitin and I have long been involved with various NGOs in India as well as the USA. These experiences contributed to a strong belief that issues and ideas share common threads globally, so information sharing and collaboration can lead to better solutions for everyone. Thus convinced, in August 2007 we founded NGO Post, a Web2.0 platform for sharing development news and facilitating collaboration.

For more on NGO Post, see the FAQs or take the Quick Tour

The book that gave this blog its name

Found that the book was written by Poile Sengupta and published by the Children's Book Trust, India. Seems like a fairly well-listed book, though possibly out of print now.

Random aside: The title of this blog is somewhat inspired by The Namesake which I watched today and it still thrives in my mind :)

The Exquisite Balance

Much as we may wish not, some things are meant to be. After a funny first adventure, I find myself looking for a blog name again! Thankfully the search was much shorter and more satisfying this time around :)

When I was still a school girl, a friend had given me a set of books for a birthday present. Most of them were kid-fiction but one was different. Called "The Exquisite Balance" , it had a picture of a boy and a girl sitting on the two pans of a scale, in perfect balance. Even though the contents of the book have long faded from memory, somehow the phrase and the picture have stubbornly stuck through the years. Often, as I wonder about random phenomena in life and nature, they keep coming back to me as the only way to describe the wonderfully delicate harmony that pervades all aspects of the world around us.

This blog shall hope to be a reflection of these random musings :)