Day 0 - Thursday 12th September
Australia is far away. 10,500 miles (16,898 km) that's 3 x 7 hr flights + 2 x flight changes. I can't wait for sub-orbital intercontinental flights to become routine! The +Boeing+ 777-300ER (Extended Range) +Emirates aircraft was impressive nonetheless. Equipped with a ~13" LCD touchscreen with a removal phone-sized touchscreen remote, flanked by a USB port for photo playback on the ICE (Information, Communication & Entertainment) system and a universal (110v/60Hz) power socket provided plenty of things to keep me busy.
 |
| +Emirates ICE system |
 |
| A view that never gets old |
The event kicked off for me on the Sunday afternoon with a tutorial on RGBD Image Processing for 3D Modeling and Texturing. The main focus of this session was depth information from structured light cameras, it was interesting to see some techniques being used to improve depth information from colour cameras. Hopefully I'll be able to use some of this in my research.
Sunday evening was the welcome reception. This was a great chance to mingle, chat and network. An open bar and good food facilitated this very well. Another attraction that provided a good talking point was the addition of a mini petting zoo... This was pretty surreal, I found myself in the middle of a conference center stroking a koala, kangaroo and a wombat.
 |
Now the conference kicks off properly and gets into full swing pretty quickly. There were oral presentations, tech demos and poster presentations all running in parallel. If you have a broad area of research you'll be darting from room-to-room trying to catch talks of interest. I'd recommend having a good look though the technical program and highlighting the ones of most interest and focus on attending those. It sounds obvious but trying to get round everything is impossible.
This is where the poster sessions are possible more useful as they are literally hanging round longer and it's easier to discuss the work face-to-face.
Monday was topped off with a workshop on VP9 from +Google presented by +Debargha Mukherjee. It wasn't really in my field but was an interesting insight into the performance of VP9, where it's going next and the process of software development at the big G!
Day 3 - Tuesday 17th September
There's not much else I can say quickly, other than it was much the same as Monday, a busy schedule and plenty of things to attend. I'm not going to review all the work I saw, it would take far too long and not really provide anything of great use to anyone. If you are interested in the program it can be found here.
Tuesday evening was polished off with a banquet. It started with some pretty stereotypical aboriginal music and dancing being served with the first course which was "a taste of Australia". The main course of steak followed a rather odd combination of dance and technology, not really sure it was right for a geeky audience. Fillet steak is always a welcome meal in my books, but being honest it was overcooked for my liking, it's medium-rare or gtfo. Desert was accompanied by some more stereotypical music, this time by a folk-like band.
Day 4 - Wednesday 18th September
There's not much else I can say quickly, other than it was much the same as Monday, a busy schedule and plenty of things to attend. I'm not going to review all the work I saw, it would take far too long and not really provide anything of great use to anyone. If you are interested in the program it can be found here.
Tuesday evening was polished off with a banquet. It started with some pretty stereotypical aboriginal music and dancing being served with the first course which was "a taste of Australia". The main course of steak followed a rather odd combination of dance and technology, not really sure it was right for a geeky audience. Fillet steak is always a welcome meal in my books, but being honest it was overcooked for my liking, it's medium-rare or gtfo. Desert was accompanied by some more stereotypical music, this time by a folk-like band.
Day 4 - Wednesday 18th September
Finally it was almost time to present my work, unfortunately it was toward the end of the last day so inevitably the numbers started to dwindle a bit. This said, I did have some good discussions with quite a few people who I think were interested in the results presented or very good at feigning it. Below is the poster presented.
Summary
With such a broad range of topics being presented from medical imaging, radar, image enhancement, recognition and quality assessment it was easy to get mentally fatigued by trying to take it all in. My hint for anyone yet to attend one of these conferences is just decide on whats of interest and really concentrate on those. However, don't ditch everything else entirely, the poster session are invaluable for gaining insights into other areas of research that may be of interest but at least you can read them and absorb them at your own rate.
No comments:
Post a Comment