One month ago I was in Toulouse, France, to attend the MoDELS’08 conference… Sounds important, isn’t it? 
Well, actually for me it really was. MoDELS’08 has been the first international conference I attended, and I am glad that I started with a very relevant one. I had the chance to go there because me and my colleague Adrian had an article accepted — the first in my PhD programme — in the ChaMDE 2008 workshop, a satellite event of the conference.
The six-days conference was plenty of researchers from world-wide, including many of the “big names” in software engineering. Getting in touch with some of them was definitely interesting. Many of the works presented at the conference seemed brilliant… I even learned what does it mean “megamodelling” — which is, in my opinion, the most childish keyword ever appeared in computer science. However, I have to admit that I was also disappointed by the general lack of applied results. The interest of industry in Model-Driven Engineering might vanish again if research does not (quickly) provide anything really useful to them. There is a urgent need for techniques and tools that simply work, and this is possible only if we have mature standards, which is definitely not the case nowadays. None of the works focused on that topic… Kind of surprising to me. Of course, theory is fundamental, but sometimes I had the feeling of listening to someone “selling thin air” rather than showing concrete results. To be honest, the idea that some theory “might be implemented” one day by the industry have never convinced me. The fact that the popularity of Model-Driven Engineering nowadays is not the one that researchers expected ten years ago is just an additional proof for me. Maybe one day I will be selling thin air myself too, who knows… 
But for the time being it seems to me that research is going in a dangerous direction…
Anyway, the city of Toulouse is just gorgeous. So old and so modern at the same times, it offers a lot of sightseeing, attractions and restaurants were we had delicious meals and wines. I am waiting to upload a bunch of pictures on Flickr. Unfortunately my Linux distribution provides a buggy version of the software I use to handle pictures and I have to wait the (lazy) developers to read my bug report and fix it… More complaints on this in my next post.
Well, at the moment that’s it… My next destination? NWPT’08 conference in Tallin, Estonia. I will present a work there, so keep the finger crossed for me as always!
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