The Fifth IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'2000)

The Fifth IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'2000) took place in Antibes, Juan les Pins, France, from the 3rd to the 6th of July 2000. This series of symposia started in 1995 to focus on the convergence of communications and computer technologies. In particular, discussions center on practical problems related to the design, deployment and utilization of information and networking systems. Previous meetings took place in Alexandria, Egypt, (1995 and 1997), in Athens, Greece, (1998) and in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, (1999).

This year, paper submission and the review process were conducted electronically with the use of a subset of .ConfMan. This conference management system was developed by Paal Halvorsen, Ketil Lund, Thomas Preuss, Vera Geobel, Thomas Plagemann and Hartmut Kónig (further information is available at http://ConfMan.unik/no).

The Symposium comprised 123 presentations divided into 23 sessions. Sessions of the first day dealt with various aspects of the Internet/the World Wide Web, such as performance, access, security, electronic commerce and standards. Additional topics included network management and satellite communications. The papers of the second day covered multimedia communications including broadband network design and quality of service. The subjects of the third and final day related to mobility and wireless communications, coding and signal processing, distributed systems, multicast, routing and scheduling.

On the basis of the first author's institution, the geographic breakdown of the papers at the Symposium was as follows:

Plenary sessions were organized to give an insight into new developments in the theory and practice of telecommunications. Professor Jean Pierre Hubaux from EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Switzerland discussed the research program that he is supervising on self-organized mobile ad-hoc networks, Professor Koichi Asatani from Kogakuin University, Japan, presented his views on next generation networks and services. Professor Ian Akyildiz, from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, discussed the use of satellites in future networks. Finally, Dr. Gilles Kahn, INRIA, France, gave his perspective on the subjects and management of research in the convergence era.

Veli Sahin, Senior Director, Marconi Communications, USA, organized a panel discussion on network management several industry participants. These were: Salah Aidorous, Director, Product Planning, NEC America, USA, Omar Mansour, VP of Engineering, Kamputech, USA, Hanafy Meleis, President and CEO, Trendium, USA, and Markus Noller, Director, Strategic Product Planning & Marketing, Marconi, Germany.

The Symposium was preceded by tutorials on "Voice over IP," presented by Tasos Dagiuklas from OTE-Consulting, Greece, "Multiservice optical IP networking," presented by Andrzej Jajszczyk from the University of Mining and Metallurgy, Cracow, Poland and a co-general chair of the Symposium, and the "Impact of IP on the eEvolution of Telecom networks: Business, Technology and Management," presented by Salah Aidarous.

The participants felt that future symposia should spend more time on some of the emerging topics such as cable telephony, telework, electronic commerce as well as project management in telecommunications. The challenges facing future meetings is to attempt at defining the suitable network and information technology that are suitable in a give context. In other words, how to take the environmental and societal factors into consideration, to predict the rate of technology adoption and to assess the overall acceptance of a given technological solution.

The Sixth IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC’2001) will take place in Hammamet, Tunisia, from 3-5 July,2001. Further details are available at http://www.comsoc.org/iscc/2001/iscc2001.html