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.
Jorge Tavares Notes 
Hi, Jorge!
Thank you very much for your comment at my blog and for pointing to your PPSN X personal summary. :)
It’s interesting: So far, I have heard of no negative reviews concerning the PPSN approach. Maybe, it could be a model to follow for others EC conferences. If so, the, let’s say, personal networking productivity would be much higher for EC researchers.
By the way, I put a follow up link to your PPSN summary post:
http://geneticargonaut.blogspot.com/2008/09/ppsn-x-luso-highlight.html
Até Mais!
Marcelo De Brito
The presentation works well if the presenters do their homework, which didn’t always happen this time…
Hi Marcelo and JJMerelo!
Thank you both for your comments :-) PPSN has a very interesting model that can serve as an example to other conferences. But I also agree that it can be improved in some aspects. The session chairs must be carefully chosen and should have only one session. Reviewing around 15 papers and talk about each one of them in 2 slides is not an easy task! But in the end, I think I still prefer this model instead of the classic: 15min talk + 5min for questions (each most of the times are not that interesting or useful), with lots of parallel sessions and a poster section that only contains the “almost rejected” papers.
All the best,
Jorge
[…] For the next days I will be attending PPSN 2010, in Krakow, Poland. I was here for the venue two years ago and it was a conference that I enjoyed very much. Mostly because of the model which is different […]