A conference day

Conference started today dot at 8:20. It started with a very exciting keynote by Christos Papadupoulous (got the spelling messed up definitely) - yeah the same famous computational complexity person. He gave an awesome talk on the applications of theory in networking. he talked on 3 specific issues - multi-hop clock synchronization, routing based on virtual coordinates, and congestion control in routing. The first 2 topics i had worked on myself, and was very impressed by ease and natural way he analyzed the problem. But this congestion stuff was very new to me and was fascinating. Just so elegant. I still remembered the course I had taken in my final semester at IIT and had to go through every line of his book with so much effort. But, that was just dumb me. and Christos looked like a proper theoritician too, big beard and bald head. He also stated a geometric problem very casually, which I found myself working on long after his speech. And realizing why I had (and still do) loved this sort of mathematics so much, and after spending quite a bit of time on it, also remembered why I left it for Computer Science and engineering (aka Common Sense engineering).

Then the talks got underway, quite a few papers were really nice. after a lunch (yeah, seafood again. this time shorebird sandwich) at a hawaiian restaurant, was the turn of the Systems session - in which I was to present my paper. Though it was the most interesting from my perspective, I found myself going over and over my slides and not paying full attention to the slides. was a bit tensed up I guess, as a lot of the top guys in sensor networks was around. just felt a little unnerved. anyways, my turn came and my talk went pretty well. there were questions which could handle well, and not any specific things. Boss said later, he could not really think of much scope for improvement of my talk. ;-) good relief after the not-so-polished proposal presentation last month.

Then came a panel discussion on sensor net applications, which many conferences have nowadays to have a reality check on the mainly academic papers. and then a reception and poster session on a tenth floor bay view hotel room. We went again to the same Library ale House for dinner, this time with a few more people. 2 young faculty from CMU and Harvard, a intel researcher and 2 more grad students. Had much more beer this time around. and had a fascinating time listening to the trials and hiccups and joys the bright young faculty have to go through initially. good thing I chose not to go into academia, it is a very hard life initially. They were also discussing the broken CS conference systems, and frustations of having good papers rejected for no good reason.