(See also the San Fran harbour cruise
page and the Around SF page.)
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SEKE means... |
Is this the SE and KE conference or the SE or KE conference?
If the former,
we should see all these wonderful crossover talks; e.g. my stuff
where I use a search inspired by AI on model checking.
If the latter, then most of the talks here could appear in an SE or
KE conference without much modification.
Well, after watching the presentations, I can report that this is an
"or" event and not an "and" event.
BTW, it's a
good grad student conference. Acceptance rates are high (44%) so its easy for
a student to get the experience of presenting their work.
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Attendance: Low |
Attendance at SEKE was low this year.
On the first morning,
I counted 65 heads in the room, even though
there were 115 registrations.
And it got worse.
After lunch on day two, there were only 30 people watching the
two presentations.
The day before the conference started,
Me and Gary ran our ML4SE tutorial. We had fun and it was good for us
to see what each other has been up to. Which was good since
only 2 paying folks showed. On the same day, a satellite
workshop of SEKE had 8 papers but only 3 of the presenters showed up
and NONE of the organizers were there (I had to chair one session for
that one).
Another workshop, pictured left, had great guests at a panel
session but the panelists nearly out-numbered the audience!
Why was it so low? Well, maybe it was something about the mood of the time:
- Software ain't what it used to be. The conference was held in
San Francisco, ground zero of the dot-gone meltdown.
- A lot of the SEKE audience comes from ASIA and the SARS epidemic in Asia is
making lots of folks thinking twice about travelling.
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Nations: many |
SEKE is very multi-national. Far less WASP than most North American
conferences. Which makes it a great spectator sport.
For example, the Thais take one look at prices and die of heart failure.
Lunch in San Francisco costs more than a flight from
Bangkok to Chang Mai.
Yesterday I watched a tiny Thai woman face-off a hamburger.
We agreed that only an American-sized mouth could handle such a
ridiculously huge mountain
of meat.
The Germans are amazing. They can
sustain an immense focus on technical matters for prolonged periods.
Pedantic
monotone descriptions with no quavering
in the voice and
no wavering of belief. An unstoppable juggernaut
of information. For example, yesterday I took a bus to a harbour cruise and sat for an hour
behind a German accent saying...
obviously, partially evaluating the plus function
cannot be done directly in C++ where we are expected to supply all the
arguments that a function expects so currying the function plus
is not possible in straight C++ which is why we combine both cyclic
resolution with a theta operator to compute a fixed point in linear
time thereby unifying different programming paradigms resulting in a flexible
modeling framework useful for .....
All said without ever taking a breathe.
Of course, Italians can't do this.
In mid-flight they must stop to
swill coffee, or have sex,
or elect a new parliament, or do all three at once.
And as for the Swedes,
once they leave Sweden the booze gets so cheap that they have
a hard time with focus.
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Hotels: Evil |
I hate American hotels. The air-conditioning that sucks you dry
and the uniformity that washes out your soul.
This one is better than most.
It cultivates a deliberate and somewhat surreal
French atmosphere. They answer the phone in French, the menus
are in French(first) then Englsh, and
they've recreated a mock French boulevard around the bar.
Still, it ain't and will never be Ubud. This "french"
hotels plays the same selections from Frank Sinatra every day at the same
time (strangely, as accompaniment to my first bowel movement).
It'd never happen in Bali.
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Conferences: dull! |
Shock, horror, academic conferences are tedious events.
As a graduate
student from Australia, I never noticed since I was usually jet-lagged for days one
and two. There's me, over there, passing out in the middle of talks or fighting off the fog
long enough to give a good talk.
But now I'm usually at conferences nearer my home time zone so I am
awake and alert and aware of how much the speakers drone on and on and on and...
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Conferences: stimulating! |
Fortunately, dull conferences can be survived by applying coffee to
smart people to generate interesting conversation.
Lunch on day two was spent talking to some folks from Thailand about
feature subset selection. Imagine the scene- these tiny Thai women
faced with American-sized meals. That almost shocked them as much as the
size of the bill.
Aditya Ghose was there- we've been happily arguing about all this
abductive since, um, 1997. We spoke about me getting a University of
Wollongong part-time appointment. Hope that comes through.
One woman I spoke to lived in requirements engineering heaven.
Three times a week and four weeks a month, Leila Meshkat
goes to the
Team X meetings (JPL's project design meetings) and watches
real requirements being debated by real users.
We spent hours talking about
theory updates, and Martin Feather's hair, etc etc etc.