EMJD-DC Spring Event 2017

[30th May - 1st June, 2017] We had the Spring Event this year in Brussels. My presentation and the poster are given below.

Software-Defined Inter-Cloud Composition of Big Services from Pradeeban Kathiravelu

Scalability and Resilience of Multi-Tenant Distributed Clouds in the Big Services Era from Pradeeban Kathiravelu

EMA GA 2017 at Brussels

May 26th - 27th: I have been a program representative (PR) of Erasmus Mundus Association (EMA) a few years for EMDC and EMJD-DC. However, unfortunately in the past, I missed the general assembly (GA) due to conflicts in schedules. I was the representative of EMDC master program in 2013. However, I could not attend the GA as I had the semester exams during the same days. In 2016, I was again the PR for EMJD-DC. I missed the opportunity to be present at the GA in Lugano, as I was waiting for my residence permit interview. 

This time in 2017, I made it to the GA in Brussels. I represented both EMDC and EMJD-DC this time! It is like 2013 (EMDC) and 2016 (EMJD-DC) combined. It felt nice to be there after previous failed attempts.

We had productive meetings and discussions on the past, current, and future of Erasmus Mundus. Good memories.

ICTEAM Day at UCLouvain

May 23rd: We had an ICTEAM Day at Namur, where we presented our PhD work in 180 minutes as well as in a poster. My 180 minutes talk presentation is attached below.

Componentizing Big Services in the Internet from Pradeeban Kathiravelu

GSoC Regional Groups

This is the time of new students in GSoC. There have been some interests and discussions around GSoC regional groups in the GSoC mailing list.

The regional groups serve a purpose. They discuss country-specific issues, such as issue/delays in receiving the packages in certain countries, taxation in India, local meetups in different countries or regions, or discussions in your local languages (for example, discussions in Chinese in wechat China group).Many countries have their own group. If your country had little to no participation in the past, there is a possibility to have groups covering a larger regions. For example, the group for Africa: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/gsoc-africa

You will need to do a Google search to find your local groups.

I understand some emails may be uninteresting for the audience. But pls avoid sending an email saying "can we pls stop this discussion? It is annoying to me" First you are contributing to the noise by such an email. Second, usually it comes across rude. So avoid sending them unless you are one of the moderators.

A worse case I noticed was an email I noticed asking to stop the discussions on what IM to use. The sender decided to create a separate email thread to express his point. Usually the emails are organized nicely into threads. Avoid creating new threads to express your opinion. Use the same thread. That will avoid too much distraction. If someone is not interested in that particular topic, they may ignore or mute the topic.

Feel free to join or ignore any country or regional GSoC groups. They were typically created by past-students like us. You are not obliged to join them, though they are usually very welcoming to their local students (and are more tolerant to noise).

If you are from Sri Lanka, feel free to join the Google Sri Lanka Google group. It seems to be very passive in recent years though. 

I believe there is a separate Google group managed by GSoC admins to announce the meetups formally to the GSoC admins and others - google-soc-meetups@googlegroups.com I did not see much activity in that group.

Good luck with your GSoC and related meetups.
 

Redundancy can save you, when you control it smart: SDN Middlebox Architecture for Resilient Transfers

Recently we presented a poster on our work titled, "SDN Middlebox Architecture for Resilient Transfers" at IM 2017, Lisbon. You may find the abstract and the poster below. This paper discusses a core of my EMJD-DC PhD research.

Abstract: Leveraging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and middleboxes, application-level policies can be propagated to the network. SMART is an SDN middlebox architecture that differentiates network flows based on tenant inputs. By leveraging FlowTags software middlebox in addition to the OpenFlow rules, it supports a larger scope of tenant preferences and rules from the application layer to alter the network flow behaviour. It thus ensures timely delivery of priority flows by dynamically diverting them to a less congested path or even cloning the packets of higher priority flows along with the original flow.

SDN Middlebox Architecture for Resilient Transfers from Pradeeban Kathiravelu

Predatory Recruiters and Where to Find Them

You may have seen many of those posts in LinkedIn with 1000s of likes: "Pls like this post if you are available to start working in Dubai, Doha, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi". These posts usually serve the purpose to increase the views and rankings of the recruiter. On the other hand, some of these posts are indeed partially genuine. They create a farm of potential recruits for the recruiter, to whom the recruiter will later send a mass email collecting CVs and personal information for a job that may or may not be relevant. Some of these jobs may not even exist.

I was recently contacted by a recruiter (Let's call him Tim) from such a predatory HR startup called ProvidePeople on the pretense of a job in an open source company, through LinkedIn. He sent me a connection request (by that time he was a 2nd-degree connection). He then messaged me to email him my CV. He referred to me as "Ganesh". This was the first warning that he was copy-pasting to a mass list. I was reluctant to reply to an email that was not even addressing my name properly. But he reminded me again. So I replied later.

Followed by that, he started asking personal questions such as "Current and expected salary, visa status". Further, he sent a coding challenge (or requested to share a link to a public code). I chose the latter. His SMS-style language ("u" instead of "you", no proper capitalization. Are we talking in SMS?) was the second warning. I did not pay too much attention to these warnings.

After a day or two, he replied that the company found that my CV does not have their required experience. I reminded him that it would be more appropriate to send the CV first and then find more personal information. He vigorously defended his stance, and CC'd the "co-founder" of his company so that the co-founder can support him. Interestingly the co-founder never replied to my email, defending his employee. Probably the co-founder is busy, fishing for the product (i.e., potential employees).

Part of the email communications are given below (omitting personal information):

Tim says:

[Quote]

Thank you…

What is your

Current salary:
Desired Salary:

Notice Period:
Visa Status:

Cheers
 

[/Quote]

---------------------------------------------

I shared with him in detail the notice period and visa status, though I explained to him why it is not relevant to discuss the salary right now.

I later indicated him:

[Quote]

A piece of suggestion: Pls consult the employer next time on getting the first reply before asking personal questions such as
Current salary:
Desired Salary:

Notice Period:
Visa Status:

These questions can be left  a later stage. Especially the salary details can be left to the final stages of the interview.

It wastes both of our time and invades my privacy unnecessarily. It did not reflect well on Provide. I will share my feedback with Provide later on this aspect.

Regards,
Pradeeban.

[/Quote]

----------------------------------------------------

Tim replies back sooner.

[Quote]

Hi Pradeeban,

Thanks for your thoughts. Unfortunately, I must whole heartedly disagree with: “These questions can be left at a latter stage. Specially the salary details can be left to the final stages of the interview”. We need to know this information prior to submitting your CV… this is basic information all clients ask for prior to submission, it is part of our SLA agreement. It saves wasting time with potential candidates who’s salaries not online with client budgets budgets, have maybe inflated salary expectations, visa issues that we cannot support or too long a notice period if we need a hire to start within a month.

This might be the difference between the research and commercial worlds, but the R&D organizations I work for also request this basic information upfront. Image investing 4 hours of you time in interviews, just to get to the final stages and realise the salary we have is too low for you? For a client also, that could be up to 11 man hours wasted in interviews.

I have cc’d one of our founders, ***** ******,  into the email so you can talk openly. I am sure he will voice a similar stance to myself.

Kindest Regards

[/Quote]

--------------------------------------------------------------

I reply back now addressing the "co-founder". Let's call him Stephan:

[Quote]

Hi Stephan,

Probably Tim misunderstood or misrepresented my comment (that is in the email).

"These questions can be left at a latter stage"

A quick overlook of the CV to find the match requires just 2 minutes, specially for a rejection. You may ask further personal questions when there is a match based on CV, and when the employer showed the first interest (as in, "the CV looks good. I need more information").

The same can be mentioned about asking to do the coding challenge (defer it after to the first reply from the employer. I did not do the coding challenge. I just shared a link to my work. But if someone did a coding challenge before the CV screening, this is a waste of time for the prospective employee. I estimate it may take up to an hour for this coding challenge).

I stand by my stance on asking the salary details early on is a no-no. It should be left to the employer. It is better if the employer is transparent on potential offering instead. It is a win - win. But that is a separate topic/discussion.

I have interviewed myself candidates for junior roles for my previous employers in the US and Sri Lanka. Also in my experience, I had zero instance where a recruiter (those who represent companies and research labs) asked for my salary and visa details when the CV is not even shared with the employer. This is somewhat a predatory practice.

I would rather prefer if you contact the potential employees with more personal questions when there is some interest and match from the employer's perspective. But if this is your business model, I have no say on that. But feel free to reflect upon these comments during an internal discussion.

Regards,

Pradeeban.

[/Quote]

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

No replies from Stephan. Probably Stephan's email address is not even valid. Or may be he does not care about us - we are his product. His customers are the employers.

What is next? Provide People and similar companies will ask questions such as "Are you pregnant? Do you have any life-challenging diseases?" to help the companies weed out these "anomalies" earlier? It is not just me. Someone else has observed that Providepeople.com are scammers/spammers and included them in a spam list. These are predatory companies that discriminate based on nationality, gender, and sexuality, I learned later. Meaningless expect fairness from them, although they may be functioning borderline illegal and outright immoral in their predatory/shady hiring practices. Online reviews mentioned mandatory 8 am - 6 pm work hours. We are in a weird situation where employees are brain-washed to believe their founders. I believe Tim is one of them who "must whole heartedly disagree with" me.

SD-CPS: Taming the Challenges of Cyber-Physical Systems with a Software-Defined Approach

Today I presented my paper at SDS 2017. You may find the abstract and the presentation below.

Abstract: Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) revolutionize various application domains with integration and interoperability of networking, computing systems, and mechanical devices. Due to its scale and variety, CPS faces a number of challenges and opens up a few research questions in terms of management, fault-tolerance, and scalability. We propose a software-defined approach inspired by Software-Defined Networking (SDN), to address the challenges for a wider CPS adoption. We thus design a middleware architecture for the correct and resilient operation of CPS, to manage and coordinate the interacting devices centrally in the cyberspace whilst not sacrificing the functionality and performance benefits inherent to a distributed execution.

SD-CPS: Taming the Challenges of Cyber-Physical Systems with a Software-Defined Approach from Pradeeban Kathiravelu