Conference Ratings: Explanation, and Ratings for VR2010

Toni & I have decided to rate our conference experiences with a star system. The categories are:

Coffee deliciousness: Obviously one of the most important factors of a conference. What sustains the attenders through boring talks, or any talk scheduled at 2PM or 8AM? What offsets the time zones that we've all traveled and the sleep that we're losing from living out of suitcases in unfamiliar hotel rooms? Coffee. Whether it's good or not, our dependence will force us to drink it, but if it's good we'll be happier campers.

Food tastiness: When they did conference session breaks or provided meals, was it delicious? And for my ratings, a lot has to do with vegetable availability as well. Some people don't believe in any food groups besides meat and bread. I appreciate the rest of the food pyramid.

Location: Are there cool things that we can walk to go see? (Come on, we can't sit in sessions all day long for days on end.) Can I walk to get food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or are we sentenced to starve unless we order $25 burgers from room service? Conferences are lame when we're confined to the hotel the whole time.

Session quality: Are the papers snore-inducing or do they keep us on the edge of our seats? A good rating means they kept us interested most of the time and were fairly relevant to what we do.

Community: A conference with good community means that we know some people there and/or don't feel terrified to talk to people we don't know. Some of these people are just scary, but other groups seem to be a lot more open to talk to new people and less easily offended by stupid questions.

Exhibits: It's nice when we have cool toys to play with.

Travel awesomeness: I guess this has more to do with the experience than the actual conference, but still, the airports and airlines we fly on deserve some kind of rating for how pleasant/unpleasant the experience is. Public transit belongs in this category too.

Student volunteering: A good rating means that being a student volunteer with this conference was overall a pleasant experience and worth the conference registration.

Goodies: What'd we bring back in our suitcase?

The next posts will be detailing the ratings for this semester's conferences:

VR 2010

Coffee deliciousness:
 

Typically our lab has mixed coffee opinions. Toni likes hers sweet with lots of cream and favors a medium roast. Dr. Hodges likes his brew extra bold and strong. I like mine pretty bold too with just a touch of sugar and cream. So, we end up buying multiple blends of coffee to keep in the lab. The hotel brewed Starbucks African Kitamu, which all three of us give a two thumbs up. We gulped down countless cups of this stuff.

Food tastiness: 

Session breaks were usually cookies and coffee. The cookies were huge and delicious. Breakfast every morning was bagels and pastries, which were pretty good. As far as the box lunches go, there was fruit in them. The sandwiches were good but my favorite was the veggie wrap. It had grilled veggies inside and was quite enjoyable. And the reception at WPI had awesome appetizers.

Location: 

Well, yes, Waltham is a suburb of Boston, but it's a half-hour bus ride in. And, from our hotel, there was a Dunkin Donuts, a sandwich shop, and a fish place within walking distance. When we arrived there the first night our only option (besides expensive room service) was Domino's. We are forever grateful for this experience, though, because it introduced us to the Pizza Tracker.

Session quality: 

Pretty good. Some papers were interesting, others were boring, I think mostly as a function of VR not being exactly what we've been doing lately in our lab group, and because student volunteering meant we didn't always get to go to the paper sessions we would have chosen.

Community: 

VR is a tight-knit community because not that many people do it. We're also well-connected since we're Dr. Hodges' students and he knows everyone in VR. Toni took a picture with Fred Brooks, and we hung out with his students. Our archnemesis, Blue Eyes, who asks difficult questions, took a picture with us too. Lots of other important people there are quite approachable and kind. We like getting to know people and knowing we'll probably see them next year.

Exhibits: 

If there's one thing VR people like, it's cool toys. Wide field-of-view HMDs, haptic devices, augmented reality displays, force feedback gloves...although we didn't see any olfactory displays I think most of the toys we'd ever want were there. It was fun to try them out. Demos at WPI were all right; we took our picture with a robot.

Travel awesomeness: 

Flights were fine. MBTA was not, due to our four hour ride on the 70/70A bus. Oh man. Besides that one bus ride we had no problems though.

Student volunteering: 

We had to wear bright red vests that were slightly obnoxious but it was okay. Sometimes too many volunteers were scheduled for a space but then we just worked it out among ourselves to take turns and not do the whole time, and the SV chairs were reasonable. Things were scheduled before we came in and everything was mostly organized.

Goodies: 

Everything this year has a soldier on it that we really don't know what means. We got a flash drive with conference proceedings, so that's useful. The t-shirt colors this year were highlighter yellow and worse-than-Clemson orange. The bags they gave us were bright green. I would have chosen different colors! But hey, at least they gave us some stuff.

Seattle for CRA-W Grad Cohort

Seattle doesn't even deserve to be broken up by days. We blinked and then it was over.

The CRA-W Grad Cohort is an all women, all expenses paid conference thing that is mostly about networking and helping women in computing find a support structure and some role models for themselves. It was a two-day deal: all day Friday, and half a day Saturday. We got in on Thursday night and got back to Charlotte late Saturday night. We would have stayed longer but exam week was coming up and we needed to get back to school  to study.

Flights there were long and boring, but no problem. I entertained myself with the SkyMall magazine. Here is a sampling of what you can buy:

Classy. Real classy. I'm trying to figure out the audience that this stuff is marketed to. Travelers, obviously, but who really buys these things?

We changed planes in Texas, with an hour to spare between our two flights, but it took forty-five minutes to get between the terminals. Unfortunately that was supposed to be our dinner stop. I was hungry and ready to gnaw my neighbor's arm off, but lucky for me (and my neighbor) we were flying Continental, which serves meals and snacks. Oh Continental Airlines, I love you. I would fly Continental everywhere if I could. I am never hungry or thirsty on their planes. They gave us a turkey hot dog wrapped in a crossiant and a salad. It was epically delicious (or I was epically hungry, one).

The coolest thing we saw on the way there was this giant mountain. I don't know what mountain it is but it's pretty, and big.

When we got back to the hotel, Domino's Pizza Tracker was our faithful friend since we were still hungry. Our delivery person was superspeedy. Our pizza was awesome.

There were six of us from Clemson who went to this conference. One's missing from this picture.

The most helpful sessions I attended were about networking and work-life balance. There were a couple boring sessions and a couple that were good but didn't really teach me anything I didn't know. Overall, good experience. I learned some, and it's always good to just see a whole bunch of other women in a room talking about technical stuff. The strangest thing at women's conferences, though, is being a minority at a minority conference. The ladies there were predominantly Asian, which, of course, I have nothing against, it's just strange feeling like a minority in that way.

I saw a few people I already knew from other conferences here. I unexpectedly ran into Evie again--she's following me! I met some new people. I got into an argument about whether there was anything different about being a mother and being a father. I asked my second question at a conference ("can you tell me more about being a part of a dual career couple?"). I drank lots of Tazo Wild Sweet Orange Tea and was hungry at very strange times due to the change of three time zones that my body had endured. I ate A LOT because the food was awesome at every single mealtime, and I only worked out in the hotel gym once with mediocre effort.

I didn't get to see any of Seattle, which I was sad about. The one free time we had was Friday night. Google and Microsoft had hosted a dinner reception and dance party. I ate dinner then went to lay in bed, but could have went out then, except I didn't have anyone to go out with. I'll just have to go back sometime.

The reception had some interesting cheeses.

Flying back was a little stressful because there was rainy weather that caused our flight to be late landing into Chicago. We didn't arrive into Charlotte until 1AM or so. I sleepily drove home and everyone else drove back to Clemson.

Atlanta for CHI 2010: Day Four

Oh, Thursday. The least enjoyable day I've ever spent at a conference.

By Thursday my brain was full. I was tired of sitting in sessions, especially since they were such long sessions. There were no presentations that I wanted to listen to. I was ready to leave as soon as Toni finished her student volunteer hours.

As of Thursday morning, Toni was 45 minutes short of her 20 hours. So, they scheduled her for a four hour timeslot. Lame. Well, an hour into that timeslot they were done with anything they needed her for, but they wouldn't sign her out as completing her timeslot. So she sat there with nothing to do for another hour. Then they released all student volunteers so that they could go see the keynote, and told them they had to sign out afterwards. At this point, I'm laying on the floor of the hotel lobby trying to find ways to entertain myself despite my dead laptop battery and my full brain. Toni waited until they were asking questions at the keynote--15 minutes before her shift ended. She tried to sign out and they still wouldn't let her. She left without signing out.

Well, we might as well have waited that fifteen minutes. Trying to leave Atlanta at 5:45PM is not easy. Still we made our way to 85 and eventually got home, after battling rush hour traffic and road work near Seneca. On the way home we heard a country rap song which made me laugh really hard. According to Wikipedia, country rap has been identified as a genre for more than 20 years. That's new to me.

Finally, home to Clemson. I got some subpar Chinese food, sat on my bed and ate it, and went to bed.

Atlanta for CHI 2010: Days Two and Three

Tuesday and Wednesday blur together in my memories about CHI. I remember Tuesday morning wanting to run but deciding not to because I might die in rush hour traffic in a strange city. I remember eating lunch at the Corner Bakery both days and the food being awesome. Mostly, I remember that on Tuesday we ate Indian food in a restaurant where we presented the Indian man with some ideas about what we wanted to order but he pretty much wrote down what he wanted us to order (no complaints, really, it was delicious):

and on Wednesday we went to the Georgia Aquarium for the reception. Aquariums are one of my favorite places to be in the entire world.

I still think the Chattanooga Aquarium is my very favorite ever. I didn't get to spend enough time in this one though. The food at this reception was very tasty and I ate way too much. One of the entrees was shrimp and grits, which I had to explain to a northern colleague. I told him that if he tried it he wouldn't regret it. He didn't. I also got to see my Virginia Tech colleagues at this reception and throughout the conference. It's good to keep those connections!

On one of those days Toni and I also walked to Centennial Park down near the aquarium during lunch break. A homeless man came up to us and offered directions to Centennial Park then asked for money, which apparently, Atlanta doesn't take too kindly to, because a policewoman yelled at him and told him to go to the train station. I bought him lunch and gave it to him as he was walking to the train station. I wish I could have sat down with him and heard his story. I wonder what Atlanta does to help its homeless people? I know it's a big problem there and that there are donation boxes on street corners, but where does that money go? Experience with homeless people has taught me that yes, some people are slackers, but not all of them, and some have just had a really rough time of it and need some help.

I also forgot to write about Jerome's car saga. Here is what happened to him and his car at CHI:

Jerome had to arrive in Atlanta on Friday for a preconference workshop. He parked his car in a garage and went to the workshop, and came back to find the garage locked. So, he wore the same clothes for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and hitched a ride back with Aqueasha to Clemson so he could be in class on Monday when we left. I heard about all this when Amy said, "Lauren, make sure Jerome gets to CHI, because I don't think his car is here. Something about a parking garage." Anyhow, so Jerome rode back to Atlanta with me and Toni.

He gets to the parking garage and they have booted his car. He makes up a story and they take the boot off and say they'll not charge it to his card but they do anyhow. He calls the bank to fix it. Then, I'm in bed late on Tuesday night and I get a phone call from Jerome, who had driven to meet his Mom for dinner. "Lauren, I'm going to need you to take me to the Nissan dealership tomorrow." His car had stopped working on an interstate in Atlanta! I offered to come get him but he called a tow truck and got his car towed to the dealership. The transmission had to be replaced--an $800 repair :(. He somehow managed to catch rides back and forth to the dealership, missing most of the conference on Wednesday.

Back to the conference...

These were the most enjoyable paper sessions to me. I went to a great session on HCI in India and a couple sessions on HCI4D: human computer interaction for developing countries, which I didn't know existed, but kind of lines up with what I want to do. The first session I went to on it I was elated, thinking, "This is perfect! This is exactly what I want to do! Yay!", but then a couple sessions later on it I realized that it's not quite what I want to do and was tired of hearing silly acronyms like "HCI4D" and hippie buzzwords. Do I still want to do HCI4D? Maybe. But it seems too trendy to me now to commit to. Also, it seems kind of unattainable except for an elite group of people who have connections and access to people in developing countries. I don't have those connections so projects like that are put on the shelf for me right now. I'll focus on developing good interfaces for everyday people that I can connect with.

There were lots of good presentations that I need to go read papers for. CHI's a weird conference because it's both social sciences and computer science. I tend to appreciate the papers with a technical achievement more than the ones that are purely social studies just because of my own orientation, I suppose. There were lots of both, and perhaps the best papers were those that integrated the best elements of both fields: good requirements gathering, strong implementation, excellent evaluation techniques, enlightening results. I feel like my work would fit well here.

I also asked my first question after a presentation. I was shaky and nervous but I didn't say anything stupid. I had already neglected to ask one good question in another presentation due to nervousness so when I thought of this one the audience was significantly smaller so I decided to go for it. I'll still be afraid of asking questions but maybe the first one is the hardest?

One more day at CHI!

Atlanta for CHI 2010: Day One

Monday morning Toni, Jerome, and I had classes to attend so we decided to leave for CHI together after our 10:00 algorithms class. Jerome rode with me to my apartment to pick up my glasses, which I forgot, and then we picked up Toni. This is us at the beginning of our trip, and is probably one of my favorite pictures from the trip. Check out how Jerome is lurking...

We grabbed some lunch at Chick-fil-a and drove the couple hours to Atlanta, which was pretty uneventful. Once we got to Atlanta we checked into the lovely Motel 6, which actually wasn't too bad. The worst thing about it was that Toni and I had a room next to the front door. Toni had already stayed there one night and found out that you hear everything from that room: phone calls to the desk, doors opening, and of course, the roar of I-75 directly next to your window. But hey, it was cheap and clean and only a couple blocks away from the conference hotel, so we weren't complaining.

Toni and I sat around for an hour and then headed to the 4:00 session. I didn't know until I got there but my friend Evie was there!

Evie has been working on this game called Snag'Em designed for social networking at conferences. We tried to play but I think that not enough people at the conference signed up to find anyone. That's okay, though. 

For dinner we we went to a Mexican restaurant called Mama Ninfa's, which I know I've been to before, although I don't remember when. I ordered this cheese casserole thing that I envisoned as peppers, onions, and mushrooms covered in a layer of cheese, but it turned out to be pretty much a bowl of cheese with a mushroom in it. It was delicious, although terrible for me, I'm sure. Here's a picture of all of us.

Over dinner, we reminisced over old code that we held in common with our UNCC friends--Haptek code, VR_Walking, VGIS...we laughed a lot about grad student code and how terrible it is. I hope that I can leave better code than that for my successors.

Instead of walking, since Amy and Cathy's husbands had drove into the city, we piled into one car so they could drive us to the hotel. Jerome almost disowned his research family by saying he would walk but we made him get in the car. Here's a picture of how close our research group is:

Good thing they drove us home--there were some slightly sketchy people in our hotel parking lot. We went to bed and got ready for the rest of the week.

Charleston, SC for the Cooper River Bridge Run

Due to all my travel, the blog I made to record my travels has been impossible to sit down and write. Oh well. Now that classes are out and there is only one more trip on the horizon, I can hopefully catch up!

Three days after I returned to Clemson after VR, I took a trip to Charleston for the Cooper River Bridge Run to run my first 10K. My sister, Victoria, was also running, so my parents and youngest sister, Briana, also came down to watch us run.

My traveling companions from Clemson to Charleston were Austen, a labmate who was also running the bridge and is an awesome runner, and Allen, who was doing the after the bridge run bike ride the following day. I asked Austen to bring his iPod adapter to my car so we'd have music to listen to...and then we found out that my car does not have a cassette player, which is what his iPod adapter is. So, he spent the first forty-five minutes of our trip burning CDs from his laptop for us to listen to. For the record, he has pretty good taste in music.

We saw lots of interesting things during the journey. We talked about lots of other interesting things.

Eventually we dropped Austen off in Summerville so he could meet his friends. Then Allen and I went to dinner at Ruby Tuesday's because it is delicious and I was hungry. I ate a giant salad and lots of those croutons. (Did you know that those croutons are so good because they deep fry them? Well, I didn't.) After that I dropped Allen off where he was staying and I went to meet my family.

The run goes from the Mt. Pleasant side of the bridge to the Charleston side of the bridge, and the roads close down on the bridge the morning of, so my family was staying on the Mt. Pleasant side so we'd be able to get to the starting line soon. Driving over the bridge to Mt. Pleasant I was really nervous. The bridge seemed so long and so steep! It was my nemesis. I had ran a straight 10K only two times before then, and that was last week on the road my family lives on, so I didn't feel well prepared.

My family came with lots of delicious snacks, mmm. We stayed up until 11 or so talking and then went to bed.

We woke up early the next morning and got ready. Victoria and I ate bagels and put on our running bibs.

It took FOREVER to get to the dropoff point because of all the traffic, and when we got out, we still had a good way to go to the starting line. By this time, I really had to use the bathroom (nervousness and too much water to drink!) and the lines for the portapotties were 10 people long. Victoria was too nervous and went ahead to the start line but I waited in line knowing that it would make for a much less miserable run.

However, due to this, I didn't get to the start line in time and had to begin with the walk/run category. Normally I am a pretty laid back kind of person and am not competitive or aggressive, but that morning I was so angry at all the people around me for not getting out of my way so I could run. I guess it was the adrenaline! I was ready to tackle some people. Signs everywhere instructed walkers to stay right and runners to stay left, and I was running on the very left edge of the road and people were walking stopping to take pictures every 30 seconds directly in front of me. I spent the entire race weaving through people to get ahead of them, which slowed me down a lot. The run itself wasn't bad though, I guess because I wasn't pushing as hard as I wanted to. I finished in a little over an hour. I was hoping to finish under an hour but given the circumstances I'm proud of my finish time.

At the finish festival I found Austen first. We had a sweaty victory hug, ranted about people walking getting in our way while we were running, and determined to redeem ourselves in a future race. By luck we found our friend Luke from Clemson. Since I didn't have a camera I took a mental snapshot of us :) And then, miraculously, I found Victoria. We had planned to meet by the portapotties, but there were five billion of them, so we're going to pick a better meeting spot next year because it was only by luck (or God looking out for us) that we met. We went and grabbed goodies from all the people giving away stuff then walked to her dorm room to shower and change.

Not having really thought this through, I didn't have any clothes on that side of the bridge, and my family couldn't get over to meet us for hours. I wore some of Victoria's clothes, which was interesting because we wear the same sizes but are different shapes, haha. We walked with her roommate to Harris Teeter to pick up a few groceries. I was so tired but not hungry so I didn't eat. Then Mom and Dad came to pick us up. Driving to Folly Beach, all the sudden I realized that if I didn't eat I was going to die (my body has strange ways of expressing hunger these days). So we stopped at Chick-fil-a and ate. After that we checked out some really cool mural art near Folly Beach, then went out on the beach for like five minutes until we decided it was too cold and windy to actually enjoy it.

We went to dinner at Hyman's (it's touristy, yes, but also delicious, so be quiet, naysayers) where I regained all my running calories by eating fried flounder. And then Dad, in a spontaneous move, bought us all potato guns to play with. The parents and Briana then left and I went to Victoria's dorm room to stay the night. It was one of Victoria's friends' birthday so we ate brownies and a pie in celebration of that, and then a potato gun fight ensued. Finally it was bedtime. By this time I was exhausted. I slept like a rock all night.

I went to church with Victoria and her friends at Sanctuary (which I would recommend if you're looking for a church in that area). She then cooked us a delicious dinner of jambalaya and green beans, and then I sat with her at the desk while she took her shift and I waited to hear from Allen to say his bike ride was over.

We got the run results on Sunday online. My sister was 201st place for women (out of like 20,000)! Isn't that awesome?

We left Charleston around 5:00 and it took FOREVER to get back to Clemson. We stopped at a Mexican restaurant that definitely used to be a Quincy's. When we arrived home I had to go directly to the lab to finish algorithms homework. Lame.

Will I ever do the bridge run again? Definitely. Gotta redeem myself next year and get a time under an hour! I'll aim for 55 minutes--that's a just-under-nine-minute mile, which I can totally do. And it's not a difficult course! Will I ever run further than 10K? I don't know. Maybe I'll get to half-marathon one day, which is about twice a 10K. For the summer, though, I think I'll go light on the running to give my joints a break (and because it's so hot outside!) and go heavier on the swimming. Maybe there's a triathlon in my future?