We’ve arrived without incident in Grand Forks, ND, for MICS 2007. To be blunt, I tend to not come to MICS very often because the quality of the presentations generally isn’t very impressive (not the best examples of scientists as great communicators, I’m afraid).
We have four UMM student talks at this year’s conference, including a talk by two students I’ve been working with on the impact of geography and local mating on diversity in evolutionary computation. Elena set up an evening practice session Wednesday where we could to see and provide feedback on the four talks, and they were quite impressive, so I’m quite confident about those presentations.
Unfortunately, I’m not so confident concerning the other presentations, and the PowerPoint Phluff alone may induce an aneurysm before we’re done. We’re currently being droned at by a panel of industry people talking about the state of the field (or some such – not clear what the point of this is), and a guy from Rockwell Collins just did his darnest to make interesting material really unfocused and hard to listen to. Sigh. The next guy (from Great Plains/Microsoft) was much more interesting, and seemed to have a point and focus. And thus we have what is likely to be a microcosm of the weekend.
Quote for the day: “If you don’t do at least a billion dollars in sales, you’re really just a rounding error at Microsoft.” Yikes! Sadly these industry guys all seemed to see this as a recruiting opportunity at least as much as a chance to share information with their audience.
They have good wireless, though, so if nothing else I can catch up on e-mail and bury you in content free bored-conference-blogging :-).
Our first two students (Rob and Emily) both gave their talks today and both did excellent jobs. In both cases their talks were nearly as good as anything else I saw today, and significantly better than several (including several by experienced faculty). Well done!
I’m glad to hear I am not the only one who sustained massive head trauma from that panel. MICS really is a crapshoot. I went my sophomore year knowing that most of the material was out of my league. Nonetheless, I was shocked at how bad the talks were from a public speaking standpoint. I really don’t like it when conferences reinforce the stereotype that computer science people cannot speak to an audience. They should really have a class on working the crowd. With all of the cool stuff we’re doing (petaflops! Awesome!) it’s amazing that people can be so monotone. It was supposed to be a celebration, yet I find that our group was the only one celebrating.
When there is little fun to be had, UMM CSCI makes its own. I’m going to miss you guys :\