Taken for Granted

It’s a good thing I looked at the long-range Meteo for Nice last week – it forecast lots of rain.  Although I have missed most of it, I actually managed to use the umbrella I brought with me this morning when walking up from the hotel to the Acropolis conference centre where DATE is taking place.  The meteo now forecasts the weather clearing up and it being sunny by the end of the week (and I forgot my sunglasses).

From my first visit here for DATE 2007, I have thought that the building opposite the Acropolis centre is a good commentary on engineering and high technology:

La Tete Carree, Nice

There is also something about DATE and politicians.  Last time as DATE 2007 was finishing, they were installing metal detectors and crash barriers at the Acropolis because Jean Marie le Pen, the controversial French politician, was giving a talk that evening.   Today I saw some crash barriers that had been set up, and later someone said that they saw van after van of police near the centre, because Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, was speaking in another part of the Acropolis centre.  (I hoped he was coming for some of the DATE technical sessions, but no such luck!)

DATE actually started last evening with a reception and the PhD forum.  I saw one interesting poster on instruction customisation and talked a bit to the student and walked through the crowds noting another couple of interesting posters, but then had to go off to a business meeting.  It was crowded, and I heard that the technical conference pre-registration was over 700 which would make it about the same as last year.  Certainly at this morning’s opening session there was a good crowd.

The two keynotes were by Mike Muller, “HAS ANYTHING CHANGED IN ELECTRONIC DESIGN SINCE 1983?”

and by Joseph Sifakis, “EMBEDDED SYSTEMS DESIGN – SCIENTIFIC CHALLENGES AND WORK DIRECTIONS”

I had hoped for a little more than they delivered.  Mike had some interesting comparisons of the state of technology (especially for road warriors) in 1980, 1983, 1993, 2003 and 2009, and some lessons from his experiences, including “Don’t buy an MP (MultiProcessor) story from a HW guy” and “Formal is still promising” (he decided not to take the optional formal methods course when he did computing in 1977-1980), for me there was a little too much dwelling on the past and not enough on the future.   Joseph had a lot of good technical points about the challenges and future directions for embedded systems but it was a bit too diverse to make a really engaging keynote.

I later attended some papers, talked to some vendors in the (small) exhibit and attended a panel session on High-Level Synthesis (“Is the Second Wave of HLS the One Industry will Surf?”) that contained some lively points and some good questions from the floor (I confess I asked one too).  It did have a lot of substitutions and dropouts, but the panelists who did participate and the moderator did a pretty good job.  Perhaps since it was from 1700 to 1830 people’s energy was flagging (I know mine was).

However, I perked right up and went to the European System C Users Group meeting which had an interesting set of talks and was quite crowded – 60-80 people I estimated.    They made you work (attend the first hour) for the drinks and snacks, and a pretty good crowd stayed on for the second half.   Interesting talks and chats about TLM 2.0 and related topics.   The slides are due to be posted at the ESCUG site here within a week.

I think that’s it for day one.  Please comment if you have a question about DATE and I’ll try to answer it and write up more tomorrow.