Comments on: Privacy Law Scholars Conference

By: Conferences: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly aspects « 33 Bits of Entropy

Conferences: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly aspects « 33 Bits of Entropy — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 07:24:17 +0000

[...] has parallel sessions. I had a great experience with that format at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference, but this time I’m not so sure — I’m regularly finding conflicts among the [...]

By: Suresh

Suresh — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:16:20 +0000

Don’t know which CS conferences you attend :). almost every conference I attend has multiple sessions, and these are usually clustered by topic, to give an approximation of tracks.

By: wyposazenie hoteli

wyposazenie hoteli — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:32:36 +0000

Nice to tknow such conferences are around. Maybe it is nothing huge, but good occasion to meet interesgint people or gain useful information.

By: Arvind

Arvind — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:07:52 +0000

Tipsy: I’m not sure why you would expect that. Conferences are an incredibly efficient way to meet a ton of new people and exchange new ideas in a short period of time; online interactions don’t even come close to achieving that kind of “bandwidth.” (See also my comment above.)

If you’re trying to flesh out a vague, half-formed research idea with another person, we simply don’t have the technology to do it without face-to-face interaction. Even webcams are not enough.

By: Tipsy

Tipsy — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:40:57 +0000

It’s funny, you’d think that these days everything would be orginised online yet there’s still hundreds of “real-life” conferences people attend.

By: web design in miami

web design in miami — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:46:54 +0000

Talks get boring fast, especially if whoever is talking is not very charismatic …
I really like this way of organizing things, keeps the people focused on what they want to learn, keeps them interested in the topic. And as a result, they learn more.

By: Arvind

Arvind — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:55:07 +0000

On the contrary, talks can be easily broadcast over the web with only a minimal loss of information and context. In fact, it is one of my pet peeves that most CS conferences don’t yet broadcast their talks.

The real purpose of conferences is networking, a fact that gets drilled into every newbie researcher by their mentor/advisor. As I discovered at this conference, there can be an important secondary purpose: roundtable discussions about papers. I have never seen this done effectively before.

Anyway, let me reiterate that talks are absolutely not the point of conferences. Also, research never gets done in online group discussions; the mental bandwidth is just too low.

By: Pozycjonowanie Poznan

Pozycjonowanie Poznan — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:52:35 +0000

Well this sounds interesting but aren’t speaches the whole point of conferences? I mean otherwise you might as well be discussing this stuff online.