This year is the first time I’ve ever been to an acadmic conference. I’ve been to conferences held by industry, and even presented at conferences held by my department. But for academia, this was a first for me. I’d like to just write about things I noticed and think (my opinions might be wrong / change over time!!)
Poster presentation VS regular presentation
Given that the papers are published on ACM – where the papers are open access – I can just read the full paper online. I’d like to not discredit any presenters, but in my opinion if I were to slog through 20 presentations a day of just talks, I’d rather have an interactive session with their posters instead. I do feel that posters offer me a better chance of engaging with the authors of the papers more than a presentation would. Sure – we need to give students a chance to develop those skills; so maybe I’m putting too much emphasis on the presentations and instead should attend more poster presentations instead.
Networking
I think an amazing part about academic conferences is that people generally don’t have a hidden agenda to try and recruit or sell something. Most people are just looking for collaborators, bouncing ideas off of each other, and having a good time networking. This is a huge contrast to what I see in industrial conferences. If you see someone approach you / talk to you in one of those conferences, chances are they are trying to sell you something or pushing some agenda.
On presentations
I did my presentation on GraphQLer – it went ok. The reason I say it only went “ok” is because I didn’t get many questions, not a lot of engagement. Some things that I wanted to point out during these presentations that I found odd:
- Some students would create questions that they would ask themselves during the Q&A period. This made it seem odd since in one of the cases, it was so obvious that the presenter memorized the answer to the question that when they were answering back, they were looking at the MC while responding. I understand that getting questions is nerve racking, but it’s a good experience!! (for any students reading my blog haha)
- Going over time – I start dozing off too easily :(
On myself
I tried my best this time to network with as many people as possible. Notable, having at least a few conversations a day. Luckily, I didn’t find this part too challenging. People were generally very open to talking. The technique I found was to find any tables (during lunchtime / dinner) that only had 2/3 people talking; I would ask if I could join and people usually said yes. Then the conversation started from there. As an introverted person myself, I found that I had to push myself a little bit in the beginning to overcome that activation energy, but once I was engaged, the rest of it felt natural.
The end
I’m very happy I got the opportunity to come here. After talking with so many researchers, I find that the agentic era is truly here. Everyone’s using agents for their work. I chatted with a PhD student on what they thought about OpenAI solving all those math problems and leaving nothing left – to which he gave me a good answer: “The role of mathmeticians is to understand those proofs”. And that resonated quite a bit with me. AI is a tool that can help us – AI also has more context than us, and feels smarter than us. But at the end of the day, explaining and understand – that is the reason for research.