The Conference Survival Guide

SoCPar 2010, Paris

I enjoy attending conferences. I never attended a conference when I did not have something to present. This is usually because of the funding, as it is unlikely for me to get funded to a conference when I am not presenting my work. So far, WWW2011 is the only conference that I attended without having a paper to present. Conferences help me fine tune my research, make new friends and build a network. I still vividly recall my first conference, SoCPaR 2010. I was presenting our paper, and luckily for me, I had 3 of my best friends with me. I was not alone. We all were co-authors of the paper, a team effort during our BSc times. I recall presenting the paper confidently and discussing with other researchers. Prof. Ajith Abraham of MIRLABS, who was organizing the conference remarked that he remembered us, a 4-member team arriving in Paris all the way from Sri Lanka to present our paper. It was a nice experience to travel to Paris, my first overseas trip. It was a cold winter, full of snow. The conference was held in Université de Cergy-Pontoise. I met two researchers from the same university in latter conferences, bringing back memories from 2010. 

Be prepared for the delayed luggage

Interestingly, the second conference I presented my paper was again in Paris in 2014. This time, it was MASCOTS, and this was the first paper of my MSc, and also the first paper as the first author. The other conference as part of my MSc research was UCC'14 in London. I met my friend there after a long time, and we had some good chat!

I love visiting different countries and various cities. Attending conferences also offers this opportunity. Moreover, the conferences immediately give you some partners to travel with. You meet some random researchers and make friends with them - because of the shared research interest (or purely because you are from the same university, country, or have something in common other than the research interest). For the rest of the conference, you can explore the city with them.

I try my best to attend all the sessions at the conferences. However, sometimes it is inevitable that I miss one session. Especially the earliest one on the day following my presentation. This is because sometimes I feel tired after the long presentation and its preparations and oversleep the following day. I also enjoy the coffee breaks, lunch times, and the gala dinner. The ideal time to make friends. You are lucky if your presentation comes on the first day. You can relax and enjoy the remaining talks/sessions without having to check your presentation once in a while.

I have attended several conferences during my Ph.D. As a result, I have traveled to several cities: Tempe, AZ, USA (IC2E'15); Berlin, Germany (IC2E'16); San Francisco, CA, USA (AMIA'16 and ICWS'16); Rhodes, Greece (CoopIS'16); Valencia, Spain (SDS'17); Munich, Germany (VLDB'17); Barcelona, Spain (SDS'18); and Zurich, Switzerland (Networking'18). Sometimes, I have one or two additional days following a conference. I use these days to travel to a near-by country or a city.

IFIP Networking'18 is my last conference as a Ph.D. student. It was also my best conference experience so far. I thoroughly enjoyed and actively participated in IFIP where I presented my paper, NetUber. I attended all the sessions. Conferences make me happy. And caffeine helps me remain super-active throughout the whole day of sessions, followed by evening and nightly walks. An overdose of caffeine made me super-active throughout the IFIP sessions. However, after I returned from the conference I became a zombie, with the withdrawal symptoms. :D

Conferences always leave me with good memories - no exceptions so far. They give me more knowledge, and also other experiences with travels. I thank all the conference organizers and volunteers who make sure that we all have good experience attending the conference.

Airport Stories

The beautiful French Riviera (Côte d'Azur)

I am waiting for the flight to return to Lisboa in the Barcelona airport. Yesterday was a crazy day. First time in my life I had a return flight on the same day, from/to Barcelona and Nice. And also a non-stop walk across Monaco, stopping only for lunch. The French Rivera is a beautiful region. I enjoyed the view from the bus as it passes by with the view of mountains covered by clouds and glimpses of the Mediterranean sea with yachts. Barcelona airport does not seem to have free wifi in the airside. At least where I am sitting, has not even a slight trace of public wifi. I write this blog post sitting on the seats on gEdit, saving it to post when I return to the civilization where I have the Internet access.

SoCPaR2010

SoCPaR (International Conference on Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition) is an annual conference that focuses on bringing the Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition together ~ "Innovating and Inspiring Soft Computing and Intelligent Pattern Recognition". For the second consecutive year, SoCPaR has been successfully conducted. SoCPaR 2009 was held in Malacca, Malaysia on December 4th - 7th, 2009, which was followed by SoCPaR2010 in Cergy Pontoise / Paris, France at Universite' de Cergy Pontoise on December 7th - 10th, 2010. Following the two successful years, SoCPaR2011 has been scheduled to be held on Dalian, China on October 14th - 16th, 2011.

Presenting the paper on Association Rule Mining
It was really a pleasant experience for me presenting our paper on our research "Horizontal Format Data Mining with Extended Bitmaps [1]" on SoCPaR2010. Our paper has been listed as Paper 113 in the proceedings. I presented the paper on Dec 8th, 2.30 - 3.00 p.m at E1 auditorium of the University, where the conference had 3 parallel sessions at E1, E2, and Colloque. It should be noted that the paper was from the same team of undergraduates from the University of Moratuwa who published a paper on their product, "Mooshabaya - A Mashup Generator for XBaya [2]". Our paper got positive and constructive feedbacks, which essentially gives us more idea towards taking the algorithm forward. We have our algorithm implementation benchmarked with the FIMI datasets, and also have the door opened to the competition of algorithm implementations on Frequent Itemset Mining Implementations, as suggested by the chair.

Paris (6th - 11th, December 2010)
Apart from the paper presentations and tech talks, we also had social events and extra social activities such as 'Paris by Night', 'Wine Tasting', 'Visit to Chateau de Chantilly', and Banquet at Abbey of Royaumont [3][4], organized by the committee. It was a nice learning experience along with the days filled with fun. It should also be noted that we had the opportunity to face the strongest snowfall that Paris experienced after the year 1986. After the conference, we were also able to enjoy two more days at Paris, and were lucky enough to visit Louvre (the museum where Mona Lisa and many other master pieces live), Notre Dame Cathedral, Montmartre Hill along with a big white church Basilica of Sacre-Coeur on its crust, Eiffel Tower, and a few other places of interest.

[1] Buddhika De Alwis, Supun Malinga, Kathiravelu Pradeeban, Denis Weerasiri, Shehan Perera. "Horizontal Format Data Mining with Extended Bitmaps," in  Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition (SoCPaR2010), Cergy-Pontoise, Paris, France. pp 220-223, Dec. 2010.

[2] Buddhika De Alwis, Supun Malinga, Kathiravelu Pradeeban, Denis Weerasiri, Srinath Perera, Vishaka Nanayakkara. "Mooshabaya: mashup generator for XBaya," in Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Middleware for Grids, Clouds and e-Science (MGC '10), Bangalore, India. ISBN: 978-1-4503-0453-5 doi>10.1145/1890799.1890807 

[3] The abbey
[4] Photos of the Abbey