Entries in "conferences"
January 22, 2007
How do people respond to conference deadlines?
Together with Eduardo Izquierdo-Torres, I'm organisng a workshop (Evolution and Dynamics of Learning - note that we're still finalising the CFP and website) at this year's European Conference on Artificial Life. We're working out when to set the various deadlines (paper submission, return of reviews to us, camera-ready proofs), and it led me to wonder about something: do most researchers set out to write papers in response to a specific conference/workshop announcement, or do they write papers when they're ready and then look for a conference or workshop to submit them to? I know that a large proportion of my small readership are active scientists at one level or another; what do you do?
July 13, 2006
GECCO braindump
I've spent most of the past week at GECCO - the Genetic and Evolutionary Computing Conference. It was, as expected, not as relevant to me as ALife, but at the same time it was gratifying to see how much quality content there was in the Real World Applications
and Evolutionary Computation in Practice
tracks. I should definitely make a point of going to the GECCO closest in time to my graduation, as it would be a very good way to find out about the sorts of jobs worth me applying to. Till then, I think I should prioritise the conferences with a more scientific and less engineering emphasis.
As a personal preference, I also prefer single-tracked conferences. The advantage of having multiple parallel tracks (GECCO had as many as 9 sessions going on at any given time) is that it allows greater breadth of content, but the drawback is that splinters the conference. I find that I get as much value out of a conference in terms of being able to talk to many like-minded people about their and my work as I do from the presentations themselves, and it's much easier to make conversation when everyone's been listening to the same thing, and is there because of a comparatively well-defined theme.
The customary braindump follows after the cut.
Continue reading "GECCO braindump"
June 14, 2006
ALife X braindump
Last week I attended ALife X. I spoke to many people, took many notes, and flagged a large number of papers to read. Because of the difficulty of writing a worthwhile summary of a conference like this, what follows behind the cut is a disorganised 'braindump' from my notes. That way at least I'll cognitively process the information a little more, and it's within the realm of possibility that the notes will be of some use to someone else.
Continue reading "ALife X braindump"
September 19, 2005
ECAL 2005
2 weeks ago I was in Canterbury for ECAL 2005. I've taken a while to write about it because I wasn't quite sure how to structure a conference review. I'm still not, but behind the cut I'll rehash the report I sent to the rest of my lab so as to at least say something about it.