Tuesday, September 28, 2010

The Conference: Day 3

We have reached the final day of the conference, the culmination of the trip and the day that I, after what has seemed like ages get to present.

I am sure that you can tell by this picture that I am... wait... I look mad, that doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, the day started, once again early, luckily I wasn't feeling any effects from the banquet and the copious amounts of wine that I drank. My stomach did feel a little queasy, but I was able to eat that breakfast that Chris B. made, which was good since I needed to eat before the presentation, it helped a lot.

I just have to say that Chris B. made breakfast almost everyday of the conference and it was great, having food prepared and not having to worry about getting it was very nice.

So there had been some debate about whether or not we should go to the last keynote since it didn't sound incredibly interesting, but I woke up early and Eric wanted to go since he had attended and paid attention to everything. Chris B seemed to indicate that he wasn't going to go, but he actually ended up going with us.

We were...slightly late. I am not sure by how much, only a few minutes I think, but the keynote was actually surprisingly well attended, there were a lot of people there and considering that the banquet had been last night and that it had ended late, I thought there would be less people.

I do have to so, that I was slightly distracted since I was thinking about my own presentation, but the keynote was... hard to pay attention to. The material was interesting enough, it was about security for UML diagrams and how to set it up. The presenter was German and at times his accent was a bit tough to follow and his slides were soooo packed with information that it made it difficult. Anyway, here are my notes from the keynote:

Why do UML diagrams need security? Did I miss something?
Germans, as they tend to strive for perfection, are the perfect people to do security stuff
1 security break in 100,000 years is too much.... wow
This guys answers are sooooo long :/

And then it was over... the time had come for me to present. Since the keynote went a bit long, there was only a 15 minute break. I tested my computer to make sure that it connected, then I went and got a snack and walked around a little bit to calm down and headed back into the room. I ran into Chris S. (my adviser), and we talked a little bit about the presentation and I said that it was a bit long and he advised me that I should take my time on the data since it was the most interesting part and then if necessary I should speed through the last part. Then he told me that I had done this before and that I would be fine. Simple words, but they steadied my confidence.

Here is a picture of me during the presentation. I am not sure how it actually went. For the most part I think it went well, but I did run long and had to zoom through the last couple of slides, so unfortunately, it was not as good as I would like, I was a little flustered when the guy running my session held up a sign that said STOP, but I plowed through and sort of delivered an ok finish.

I got three questions... well one was just a comment about how some of the data that we had found matched some observations that Margaret (OSU professor) had found in a previous study. The questions were not all hard to answer and then it was done.


The next talk was sort of a blur to me as I sort of had to calm down a little bit from giving my presentation, but I actually got a little interested in it as it went on and in general the whole session was really good.

My notes:

Carlos Jenson (OSU) Diagramming in Open Source
People don't know what UML diagrams are and people are using power point presentations to communicate
many view diagrams as an altruistic thing that they do to be nice

The next presentation was about bug reports and the words in bug reports and how to improve how they reported.

Notes:
Lots of people start questions with a compliment, interesting but nice.
people Game the system by saying things such as "all users experience this" etc
Resolution times for different bug types... previous work... this would be interesting to see

The next two presentations were short papers, but I actually asked a question about one, so that was kind of cool.

And then it was time for lunch. Before I could head out to lunch Michael Coblenz came up and talked to me about my presentation and about some ideas about where to go with it, which was really nice, and I think we are going to pursue one of these.

We talked for a while and then had lunch. During lunch, Eric and I sat by the guy who did a presentation on SpiderTimeTrees. I had noticed him sitting by himself for most of the conference and so I figured it would be nice to sit with him, and I like Germans for the most part. They are friendly people. ;)

We had a good conversation with him and then it was time for the final session of presentations. This was again a lot of presentations about models, which didn't seem to interest a large portion of the crowd, but it was pretty well attended. There were a few people that had problems staying awake, but I think for the fact that it was the last session, people did a good job.

So here are my notes:

The presentation was about live sequence charts that would update and you could zoom on certain parts
Why don't graphical models scale well?
Because they are too big?
Live demo... brave, it went well enough

2: The presentation was about uh... some kind of modeling. lol

Cool Russian Accent (Note: he was Portuguese)
Eric is using his computer, he was trying to not do that, but he is paying attention
He is calling the objects blobs, which I guess is fine it just sounds really funny with his accent
Wow, actually showing semantics. very rare for VL/HCC
Where do the extra lines come from?
V & V? oh...Verification and Validation

Hmm... so I didn't take notes for the rest of the presentations, but I did sort of pay attention.

The final session of the day was a panel thing, which Martin warned Eric would not be good, and he was kind of right. The last few minutes were actually interesting, but I wish that they had just allowed people to ask questions for most of the time.

So then it was all over, we had a last little goodbye session and then headed home.

Last shot of a bunch of professors (and Scott) walking at the train station:

Eric and Chris B at the train station:

So we set it up to go out around 8 or so for a kind of simple dinner, we didn't want to go all out, since we sort of did that the night before. Markus and Jacome were going to come join us.

Before hand we just hung out at our apartment. Eric got lonely since Chris B and I were just hanging out in our room. So he joined us.


Just before we left Eric started a load of laundry. He managed to wash his wallet. So we had to struggle a little to get it out and then he wrung it out. You can sort of see the water coming off of it here:
So Markus soon arrived with his stuff, he decided to just spend the night on our extra mattress. Soon Jacome and his professor and Nuno, another Portuguese student showed up and we headed out. The first stop was this restaurant that Alessio had recommended to us.... it was.... well it was far from the best place we went and it was very expensive. I also managed to make us look like fools since I tried adding the bill up and I got it wrong and then we asked the guy about it... and... then we added it again and in fact they were right... so... yeah.

Afterward we headed to the Belgian bar to see how Cuban friend once again and have some nice beer. I had to go get cash, so I am not quite sure how or what we ordered, but sadly the Cuban guy didn't seem to recognize us. Here is our table:

We sort of got tapas, at least chips and... some weird nut bowl thing. We had good conversation, and other than Markus, who has better German beer everyday, enjoyed our beer. We didn't really stay out late, and we soon headed home.

Eric had previously purchased a French? Maybe Spanish board game called Tasso, and so we cracked that out and played a few games of it. It was pretty fun actually, and it was a nice ending to the night.
Eric, Todd, and Chris B. had to go to the EUSES meeting the next day so we didn't stay up that late. And thus ended the last day of the conference.

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