musings of a different kind

As a grad student, one of the important things I have to worry about is getting research publications accepted both in conferences and in journals. However, until recently, my list of publications was, well, empty. It was only a little over a month ago that I got the news that one of my submissions to the IT (information theory) workshop at Lake Tahoe was accepted, and I went to Tahoe to present my work last week.

It seems almost axiomatic that for a conference to attract a good audience and a lot of submissions, it must be held in a place that most people would just love to vacation in. Lake Tahoe is a helluva beautiful place and is the ideal vacation destination. I'm sure many people would have jumped with joy when their paper was accepted at ITW. In essence, I was hitting two birds with one stone.

I flew to Reno on the 2nd and from there went to Tahoe city with another friend (Lei Xiao) from Notre Dame who was also presenting there. The conference was from Monday to Thursday. I had to present a poster(which I conjured up at the last minute) on Wednesday, which meant I was free on the first two days. I also met up with a couple of ex-labmates (Teng and Mei) and we made a tentative plan of action. On Monday, we were going to stick around at the conference and try our best to attend as many talks as possible. Tuesday was going to be our day off. Wednesday was all work again and Thursday was anyway the last day. There was a plenary talk by an invited speaker each day that we did not want to miss, but otherwise, we would decide on the fly about the talks we would attend. For both ease of reading and brevity, i'll just breeze through what we did through the rest of the conference.

Monday:

• Attended the plenary talk by Alon Orlitsky, which dealt primarily with the estimation of probability distributions of sources with large alphabets (You might think this sounds like gobbledygook, but trust me, it actually made some sense).
• Orlitsky's presentation style was also very engaging, which cannot always be said of plenary talks in such conferences in general.
• Attended a few regular session talks but nothing too interesting. Still, one has to at least try before giving up.

Tuesday:

• Effectively a day off :D.
• Attended the plenary by Giuseppe Caire - the talk touched upon a number of different issues in communications, and possible ways of tackling them.
• Went for a hike with Teng, Mei and Lei immediately after the plenary.
• Climbed up a rocky path, slid down another path, lost footing a couple of times, arrived at the conference hotel in one piece just in time for lunch :).
• Went to Emarald Bay immediately after lunch. Mandatory pic tells much more than mere words could.
  

What more can I say? Emerald bay was more than worth the half hour drive from Tahoe City. It was a sight for sore eyes.

Wednesday

• Plenary talk by Pascal Vontobel dealing with some coding theory (specifically Iterative decoding, pseudocodewords and LP decoding). It was an impressive 2 hour marathon of a talk. In case you are interested, the presentation is available here in pdf form.
• Attended a few talks, but I was actually thinking about my poster presentation.
• I was a bit surprised to see quite a few people show up at the poster session, as I thought people would be a bit sluggish in the after lunch slot (when it was scheduled).
• Had a few interesting interactions with a few well known names (including Caire, Shamai, Krishna Narayanan and others). Things went pretty smoothly (phew!).
• Attended a couple of other talks, then on to dinner.
• The day ended with a performance by comedian Don McMillan, who claims to be the only comedian to use Powerpoint in his routine!
• Don McMillan was the highlight of the day without a doubt :)

Thursday

• The conference was effectively over, but I attended a few talks anyway.
• Lei had his talk in the afternoon coding theory session. Attended the talk to give him some moral support.
• Went to Reno and stayed there overnight. Returned to South Bend the next day.

If you actually had the patience to read this long post, then you deserve a pat on the back. I went to the conference between the 2nd and 6th of september and it's now the 1st of october. For a post that was nearly an entire month in the making, I suspect most people will think it wasn't worth the time. However, I don't usually abandon these things halfway, so here is the end result.