Paper Requirement for Wenxu Tong

There are two related papers on what is essentially the same body of work, and both are listed here. As Wenxu Tong's advisor but not a co-author of these papers (which are obviously outside my specialty), I have done my best to address the relevant points by relating what both Wenxu and David Lorenz have communicated to me about the papers, using direct quotes from them where appropriate.

1. Papers:

   • Wenxu Tong, Srikanth Krishnamurthy, and David H. Lorenz, Split Context Model for Software Components, submitted to ICSE'03. (Rejected)

   • Micha Moffie, Wenxu Tong, David Kaeli, and David H. Lorenz, Context Federations: A Virtual Context for Software Components, submitted to GPCE'05. (Still under review)

2. Description: This work proposes an extension of the current component-container framework to allow several different containers to be combined into one logically equivalent container while preserving certain properties.

3. Acceptance rate: The acceptance rate at the ICSE'03 conference was just below 13% (42 technical papers accepted out of 324 submissions, according to their website). David Lorenz tells me that the acceptance rate at the GPCE conferences is around 30%.

4. Student's contribution to paper: Here I include direct quotes from an email to me from Wenxu Tong and a response to that email from David Lorenz:

   From a 4/28/05 email to me from Wenxu Tong:

   For these paper, the basic question came from a class project of how to combine two or more contexts into one logical context. I analyzed the problem and proposed all those models with different assumption and structure to meet different requirements for different cases. I did the first draft writing of the whole paper and Prof. Lorenz did the modification.

   The original version was submitted to ICSE 2003

   Later on Micha Moffie came along and proposed a detailed way of implementing one of my originally proposed models and helped organizing the models into a better context framework and submitted to the GPCE. In that version, I helped in writing of section 1-5 and wrote section 6. Professor Lorenz and Prof Kaeli did the modification and proof-reading.

   The contribution of these papers are we proposed a framework that several different containers can be combined into one logical equivalent container and keeps some properties. We analyzed the different requirements of this task and the appropriate approach to these requirements. This is a substantial extension of the current component-container framework.

   David Lorenz's follow-on email to me:

   I concur with this statement and can add that in both cases the paper was written almost entirely by the students, and Wenxu had a significant contribution.

   (I purposely quoted Wenxu's email verbatim, including his minor English errors, to illustrate what I know firsthand of Wenxu's writing: His English needs to be polished a bit, so I'm sure this is something his co-authors helped with in later drafts. But having worked with him as a co-author on two posters and the journal paper that still awaits Prof. Ondrechen's help to complete, I can attest to the fact that this is just about the only limitation of his technical writing ability.)

5. Why should these papers be accepted as satisfying the paper requirement?: They clearly demonstrate that he is capable of developing original ideas and presenting them in an organized and scholarly manner.