Jorge Tavares weblog

Just got back from PPSN 2008 and I enjoyed it very much. It was my first time at this conference and I believe the poster only format, absence of parallel sessions and a summary presentation of the papers by the session chair works very well. You are given a quick overview of the papers, having a bit more of information on what you want to see and afterwards, the interactions between attendants and presenters is much stronger. Of course some posters are flooded with people whilst others not but that’s not important. I belive the conversations between researchers are always interesting.

Although there is a bias towards theory papers and Evolutionary Strategies, you have a good diversity of approaches and type of papers, from applications to new techniques for example. For me it is hard to pinpoint a best work from all that I’ve seen but I was impressed with Peter Merz‘s new approach to very large TSP problems. 

Finally, I guess the organization and the venue of the conference were very good. No complaints here. I wish I can attend in 2010 too.

I got accepted my first paper related to the work done in INRIA, at the 10th International Conference on 

Parallel Problem Solving From Nature. The event will take place in Dortmund, Germany, from September 13th until the 17th. The interesting fact about PPSN is the conference format. From the website:

“all accepted papers will be presented during small poster sessions of about 16 papers. Each session will contain papers from a wide variety of topics, and will begin by a plenary quick overview of all papers in that session by a major researcher in the field. Past experiences have shown that such presentation format led to more interactions between participants and to a deeper understanding of the papers.”

I agree that this might motivate the interaction between participants and thus, everyone will benefit much more from the event. I’m curious and I wish it will be a nice event since I’ve never been to PPSN before.