Slides and the Constraint Lookup Service

This post comes to you with a bit of unexpected delay. Nevertheless, with this post I want to give you a status update. On Wednesday 23Feb, I had to given a presentation covering my progress so far. The fact that the audience seemed to agree with most of my ideas, is another indicator that the use of the CRA mechanism is probably a solid choice.
The slides can be found on https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B2ZFuPHiC22wYmU0M2Q0OTktYjA1NS00NzcyLWI1OGYtYzM0YTVhN2ExOGQ4&hl=en_GB

About the writing on the thesis itself: this week I started writing on the 'Implementation of the CRA' section. I managed to meet my 5 pages/week deadline again by writing about how seperate lookup services should be used to implement the constraint operations. The figure below gives an idea of how such a service interacts with the other market actors.

I also made a first rudimentary price discovery prototype. Although the prototype still needs a lot of work (I'll be improving on it this week), the first results look promising (maybe it is still a bit early to make any such statements).

Besides improving upon the pricediscovery prototype, I'll continue to write about the implementation details of the CRA this week. Update next week!

About problem specification and powerpoint slides

As the week comes to an end, I'm providing you with another update.
This week I've concentrated on clearly specifying the problems that occur when trying to use Dube's market model in the current cloud computing market. I must admit that I had more difficulties with this than I had anticipated. Although the problems in itself are not very difficult, they do tend to become rather complex (as many different factors play a role). This makes clearly explaining what the exact problem is hard, as the problem itself is composed of different subproblems, of which some are also hard to define.
However, I do believe that I have succeeded in clearly defining some of the issues (a lot of work is still to be done). The result of this is now part of my thesis document (I succeeded in adding another 5 pages to the document this week).

I've also created a slideshow presentation for the presentation I mentioned last week. I will put the slides online after I've given the presentation (which will take on Wednesday, Feb 23th).

Although creating the slideshow has helped me to (re)gain a better overview over some parts, it has also made me more aware of the fact that I should invest enough time to thoroughly explaining some concepts and ideas in the thesis itself. In particular, I think I should re-evaluate the time I spend building a working prototype, the time I spend exploring new topics and the time I spend on elaborating on existing ideas. After this week, I believe that the elaboration of existing topics should get some more attention.

Since I also have to give a presentation about my research internship on Wednesday, and I still have some preparation to do for that, I think it is safer not to make to many specific plans for the coming week. I *am* going to try and work on the price discovery issue (which I didn't get to in the past week), as well as write an additional 5 pages for the thesis itself.

As already mentioned, I will be posting the slideshow of Wednesday's presentation in the second half of the week.

Start of the new semester - status update

The past few weeks I've been writing parts of my thesis. I am happy to say that I succeeded in finishing the 30 pages I set out to write in my previous blogpost. Most of what I've written is more general information about (financial/commodity) markets and some parts about Dube's constraint sets and my ideas concerning the more generic constraint sets.
Although I initially planned to put the parts I already finished online, I've decided not to do that anymore. This is mainly caused by the fact that the overal quality of the text needs a lot of extra polish and I don't want to put an half finished product online.

I've also worked a bit on the prototype, but for now, I don't have anything new to report on that.

In the coming days, I will be looking further into the price discovery issue, writing some more (to meet the 5 pages/week goal I set before) and prepare a presentation I'll be giving in the next few weeks.
I'll probably also be doing some work on my research internship which deals with desktop clouds.

Expect an update before the end of the week.