suggestions for future conferences
Henry Spencer
henry at utzoo.uucp
Sun Feb 12 09:28:01 AEST 1989
In article <5586 at pdn.nm.paradyne.com> reggie at pdn.nm.paradyne.com (George W. Leach) writes:
>... Would contacting a speaker via their hotel
>room phone be considered appropriate?
Leaving a message for them with the hotel is less likely to disturb them
and more likely to reach them (many Usenix attendees are found in their
rooms only when asleep).
>... However, the
>San Diego Conference has smaller sessions on various topics...
For those who don't understand how these things get set up, I should observe
that in a conference like the San Diego one, which didn't advertise any
specific choice of topics in advance, the session topics get picked to
fit the papers, not vice-versa. That is, after the accept/reject decisions
on individual papers are pretty much complete, one starts trying to group
them into coherent sessions. This sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
> [interactive demonstrations] ... the cost of setting
>up such a demo for a research prototype may not be worthwhile. Perhaps
>those who attend SIGGRAPH Conferences can shed some light on this area.
Here again I can comment with some authority. I was co-chair of the demos
track at CHI+GI 87 (joint ACM-SIGCHI and Graphics Interface conference).
Getting good demos is very tricky; CHI+GI had quite a mixed bag. We didn't
have too much trouble with marketing hype, partly because we'd specifically
indicated that systems ought to be demonstrated by their authors. However,
it is *very* difficult to tell whether a demo is going to be worth seeing
without seeing it. Kate Ehrlich, the other demos co-chair, tried hard to
pick good ones based on written descriptions, and concluded afterward that
this approach was basically a failure.
Also, it is a lot of work running a good demos setup. I saw very little of
CHI+GI except the inside of the demos room. We needed a lot of AV gear (it
is impossible to do effective demos for a substantial audience without
projection video, for example) and connecting 57 different kinds of computers
to video hardware can be a serious headache.
Showing demo videotapes, instead of live demos, might be a good way to try
to assess interest without getting into all the complications.
> What I would like to see is a wider availability of the Tutorial Notes.
>I know that limited quantities are sold after the tutorial sessions are over
>with. However, they sell out fast. If you don't get there in time, you will
>have to wait until you get to go to another conference. Perhaps USENIX could
>sell them as they do the proceedings, from the office in Berkeley.
The availability of tutorial notes is not necessarily under Usenix's control;
the authors have a large say in it, and often don't want unlimited quantities
distributed.
--
The Earth is our mother; | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
our nine months are up. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu
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