I have attended my first, and probably last, academic conference today. It is quite an interesting experience. The conference is hosted by Sheraton hotel downtown, so I have to wake up early again. The registration is straight forward, except they somehow mixed up my last name and first name. There was breakfast, but not as good as those at the Hyatt. The keynote speaker is from Bell Canada, he talked about trends in wireless communication for the next 5-6 years. Kinda the same thing PMC talked about in staff update. Then the rest of the day is presentation of papers in 5 different rooms. I went to my session, multimedia over wireless, for the whole day. The conference is not as crowd as I expected, my session only has about 20 people. To my disappointment, the conference doesn’t come with lunch. So I walked to Yale Town to have lunch. I wished I had bought a lighter laptop. It is the first time I carry my laptop walking. I have some shoulder pain afterward.I presented my paper in the afternoon. It went pretty smoothly. Toastmaster really helps. In the evening, the conference hosted a outdoor reception by the fountain. The food is so and so, but at least I can fill myself up. I am really disappointed drinks are not included. I have talked to a few people from Europe or the States in the reception. The default topics of conversation between any Italian, German and French is the world cup. I will attend the conference tomorrow, try to sit in other sessions. I think going to an academic conference once is enough, just have a taste of it. It is actually really boring. Try to imagine you are locked up in a room and have to listen to 10 or so technical papers full of equations the whole day. To make it worse, you have to stay awake all the time, since there ain’t many people in the room to cover you up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"