On conferences

. Wednesday, November 12, 2008
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Just a little reflection, why CS researchers spend so much money attending conferences? We attended CIKM and IDEAL recently and taking into account the costs of the travel and the limited audience, I can't understand why the conferences are so relevant in our area. Too much money expended for almost nothing, when we could organize ourselves with journals or even with virtual conferences that do not require physical attendance.

In particular, at IDEAL, in our session, from 4 expected presentations, only 2 of us (in our case Frankie presented the paper) presented their papers, and there were only 6 people in the room. Travel to Corea for that seems pretty ridiculous.

Frankie@Ideal 2008


What do you think about this particular topic?

1 comments:

Andy said...

I'm beginning to get a tad annoyed with conference travel. Recently I gave a talk, luckily to a few people whom I wanted to hear what I said. I also learned a bit about recent developments by sitting in other talks, and chatted to interesting people. But still feels too much. We should be making better use of social networking sites, e.g., dumping very concise summaries of work in various places - enough to start a chat. Then eventually human contact in meatspace is a good idea.