I just came from a conference, SSDBM 2011. It was my first conference and it was interesting. I have couple of observations
- Most people don't pay attention to what other people are saying.
- Famous professors have extremely good presentation skill and they can really make anything interesting out of nothing.
- Presentation skill can suppress technical skill.
- Most people pay attention to the talks of famous professors or those are the only talks worth/ understandable paying attention. It is hard to say which one comes first, chicken? or egg?
- Mostly conference is boring.
- I didn't understand any word of it, even though it was related to my subject.
- Discussion session before the talks was pretty interesting but mostly inconclusive.
- Socializing is a big part of a conference.
It is a growing concern that the quality of research is going down although the quantity of published papers going up. However, I belief and most people agreed on, the quantity of quality research is almost same. Thus in my view a new problem is emerging; which is finding the good stuff out of myriad of trashes. Some people are concern whether the quantity of trashes would contaminate the overall quality of research? Since the resources (money, brain, etc) are limited and huge portion of it is becoming busy of producing trashes, it is very likely this situation might affect the overall quality. But in my view, the excessive trashes are due to excessive money in this area. Because of enormous amount of money, many con people are moving toward this direction and finding their place among the real scientists. When the money would go scarce, the fight will be tough and only good research would survive, may be! I am assuming the people who are distributing the money are well capable of judging the quality of research. Anyway, more people than not would agree there is a unhealthy situation going on here and it badly requires some kind remodeling.
Regarding the conference, I think they can play a very good role in the area of scientific research, at least in the field of computer science. This is because, computer science is fast growing area of research and to compete the speed of computer science an interesting trend has developed. In computer science nobody is bothered about publishing into a journal (I mean not as serious as other area). Most computer scientists prefer conferences because of fast reviewing process. So in computer science a conference is as important as journal in other area; however the reviewing processes of many conferences are not as good as journals. So here comes an inconsistency and to fill the gap conference should really change their way of operation! One change could be if the conference audience feels like any of the presented work should be modified, the conference should have flexibility to do that.
Anyway, is it really good idea to say so much just after attending one conference. Well I may not attend many conference but I definitely read a whole lot of paper and I can tell how crappy they are. I believe, even without attending any conference one can tell what I am saying. Anyway, enough about the conference. The good part of the story is, this year SSDBM held in Portland and it was a nice city. In fact it is different from any US cities I have ever been. I took a whole lot of pictures and here are some of them.
Portland is a really nice city and people are very friendly. I don't know why but lot homeless people roam around Portland. Most amazing part is roadside food shops! wow! feels like Dhaka! Me loved it! Its top class transportation makes it really one of the must visit places in US. I am not sure about winter weather but summer weather is not all that bad.
