Professor Marvin Sirbu, from Carnegie Mellon University, was the invited speaker for the closing session of IST/IN+'s workshop seminar on "Telecom challenges and (business) opportunities".

Professor Sirbu areas of expertise are Information Economics, Telecommunications Technology & Policy, and Electronic Commerce. Naturally, the Professor's lecture focused on quality of service (QoS) over TCP-IP based communications, related technologies (such as routers that do implement some of the available QoS efforts), and models of pricing for the broadband Internet.

You can download some of Marvin Sirbu's documents from this website.

It was an interesting session, hosted by Professors Pedro Ferreira, Burkhard Schrage and Manuel Heitor.

During the afternoon, some students of IST's MsC on Engineering Policy and Management of Technology, took the chance to get some feedback on their own ongoing projects. Professor Sirbu - who strongly resembles Hollywood's Richard Dreyfuss - was happy to provide some guidance, and also learned a few things about the portuguese Internet: (1) most broadband consumer products are characterized by severe international traffic limits, as a consequence of the IPS's business models; (2) the online users community does its best to bypass those traffic limits, via proxies and by using modified software that restricts IP communications to selected portuguese IPs; and (3) the media groups have very high quality websites, providing rich services, but are struggling to keep them alive, since consumers haven't been willing to pay for the extra value.

Just like I did on the previous session, I took some terrible digital pictures. This time I ran out of space on the Compact Flash card... Check below for the surviving photos.

You might want to visit the 2003-03-16 update, also about this Telecom seminar.