Sabbatical Diary: Week 47

And so, time passes and all things come to an end. In this case, the school summer holidays are almost over; childcare responsibilities for the last couple of weeks have taken some time as a result. Meanwhile the sabbatical is in its final throes: 90% completed, nearly done for another 6 years.

This week mostly contained lots of calls and conversations—thanks in large part to the ability to do those while WFH. Several good conversations with potential Ph.D. candidates; it is a truism but I wouldn’t have had the experience or credentials to get in to do one these days, so I guess it’s good for me that I’m old.¹

Quite a lot of reviewing, though most of the processes for this year are also coming to an end: shepherding of the EuroSys’27 submission assigned to me, HotNets’26 reviewing for round 2 started following discussions arising from the round 1 reviews, and I completed my CoNEXT’26 round 2 reviews and entered the discussion phase in earnest.

Finally, farewell to Theo who’s been with us for the summer. He’s done some really nice work with Rupen on scheduling AI workloads in the RAN (so-called “AI-RAN”): hopefully a paper submission (or two!) to follow, plus even some follow-on funding from our industrial partner, fingers crossed!