View about an IETF Meeting

Last December I joined to other guys for attending IETF 70 in Vancouver.

That was the first time I participated on an IETF meeting. It was part of a program of ISOC for assisting guys in developing countries join to  Internet development groups. The ISOC initiative is very nice because it covers travel costs that otherwise that could be a big issue for not developed countries where the currency is very weak. Well I would like share some brief impressions about IETF meeting.

IETF 70 received guys from over 40 countries, from different internet/communication companies. The WG sessions ran during the whole week and were opened for all who are interested in them. They are quite focused and cover opened issues existent in the WGs. The local atmosphere is very pleasant. One of most interesting things is the method that is used for achieving consensus during the sessions, that is based in a "uhm.." murmured by the participants who agree with a determined question addressed by area directors. But IETF working groups lack some greater cooperation among them in order to reuse techniques/solutions among them improving group  performance.

Well, a interesting question is how could we  increase the presence of local (brazilian ) folks in the IETF meetings. That is not a trivial question. At first, private and public local companies are not used for supporting standards development. The company research teams are just “standard users” not “standard developers”. For example, multinational organizations located here likely lead standard development initiatives in their foreigner offices. Of course, there could have some exceptions. Second, despite the academia hold the most of Internet development research here they have a little presence in IETF; I suppose in part because academia concern is about publishing researching papers and, contrast, IETF is more focused in applied research.

In summary, attending IETF meeting was quite disappointing as exciting as well. Disappointing in the sense that it confirmed how far Brazil internet research community is from internet development excellence. Exciting because it reinforced the felling about how much challenging and fascinating is work in computer science field.

What is the future of computer science

There is a lot of discussion running concerning the low number of new students enrolled in computer science courses. That has been considered a critical issue in US; in Brazil it has not  attracted a big attention yet. Related concern is about the low number of women in the field, that in my opinion has ever been small. But it is interesting note that 2006 Turing award winner was a woman, Frances Allen. She believes that computer science curriculum is antiquated and she supports smart  views about the subject . But there are still controversial arguments in this matter. Some people argue that, in order to attract more students, the programs are not rigorous anymore and the quality of cs course is declining .
Well, I agree that it may not be too entusiastic attending a graduate course in CS. Many CS teachers think that is enough give hard home work to produce skilled graduates. But you may be a smart software engineer even that you have not spent your weekends developing C/C++ programs. There is a misunderstanding about how do motivate a CS student. As a CS student you must know why a grade is relevant, how it is related to the real-world problems and what are the current research/open issues. Additionaly the curriculum must allow more flexible choices . Encorage the pratice is fundamental. A real computer office might be simulated in the class and student should enjoy the different roles - DBA, analyst, programmer, tester - using real class problems.
About the decrease of women in CS field is nice to see some incentives given to them to attendee conferences and seminars. However I believe that we will advance only if the CS curriculum is changed. Women enjoy communication, project management and requirements engineering for example. Thus this stuff must be done so relevant as programming is in CS course, otherwise women will continue prefering other science fields. Computer Science needs to take care of communication and social interaction in order to succeed!!