Last week I attended the 2014 edition of the 11th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services (GECON). The conference took place in the nice town of Cardiff, hosted by prof. Omer Rana of the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University. As in the latest editions, the conference boasted a trio of chairmen: Jörn Altmann, Kurt Vanmechelen, and Omer Rana himself.
The conference is one of the few devoted to economics of ICT, hence it is a must for all the specialists in the field. Though the attendance has been decreasing in the latest two editions, it still exhibit a high scientific level with a number of significant contributions. In addition to two keynote talks ("Cybersecurity, Innovation and Economics" by Massimo Felici of HP Labs in Bristol, and "Machine Learning and e-Commerce: past, present and future" by Humphrey Sheil of Eysys, UK), the programme included 14 papers (among which mine on "Balancing Leasing and Insurance Costs to Achieve Total Risk Coverage in Cloud Storage Multi-Homing"). While waiting for the LNCS volume to be released by Springer, the good news is that all the paper may be downloaded free of charge from the programme page of the conference.
For those of you more interested in the networking side of the event, you can take a look at the large set of photos taken by Kurt, who's a keen photographer!
Next year's event is scheduled in September 2015 and will be hosted by an emerging university, the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Quite interestingly, the conference will sport a new structure, revolving around specialized session on emerging topics though accepting papers within the more general area of the conference.
