We have had some questions on the Virtual Attendee program for S4. Take a look at a brief replay (40 seconds) of an introduction from last year on a Windows system. You will see the video pane, powerpoint pane and a third pane that is used for Q&A and chat during live presentations. You will have an opportunity to participate virtually in the post presentation discussions.

Register for S4 Jan 23-24

See the S4 Agenda

On a separate note, there have been a number of posts on the State of California Programmable Communicating Thermostat (PCT). Grant Gilchrist’s S4 Paper describes in detail the security solution that was chosen for PCT along with security characteristics and possible attack scenarios. This highlights the S4 difference. There is a worthwhile discussion on whether PCT is a good or bad idea, but this is not an S4 discussion. At S4 we focus and get into detail on the technical issues. How would one design and deploy a secure Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)? This is a technical challenge, and it is important that a community capable of vetting proposed solutions dig into this.

Of course with another big snow storm set to hit the Northeast US, you might be interested in one of the five seats left for physical attendees in warm and sunny Miami Beach.