Dublin CASCON’06
Last week I attended the CASCON Dublin Symposium at the Dublin Software Laboratory of IBM. The event was organised in association with its bigger “sister”, the Toronto CASCON, already at its 16th edition. This year’s edition had a suggestive name: “Meeting of minds”.
The keynote speaker here in Dublin was Prof.Mark Keane, the director of Science Foundation Ireland. For me, it was an excellent opportunity for getting a broad picture of research being done in Ireland: research centres, groups, topics, funding perspectives, and so on.
There were 3 papers presented in the morning, and 3 in the afternoon (very little compared to the Toronto CASCON, who went on for 4 days and included several tracks and workshops and a technology showcase). Two guests, one from Egypt and one from Sweden, gave an international dimension to the local event.
During the lunch break, a poster session gave us the chance to network with IBMers, colleagues from other universities and other participants. My team presented two posters, and we got some very interesting feedback on them. We all voted for choosing the “best poster”, and Benoit Gaudin(and his colleagues) from University College Dublin got the award for a poster titled From Migrations to Population Concentration, based on some very interesting visualizations.
The video link with IBM Toronto worked (almost) without fault, and we were able to watch the keynote speech and the panel discussion going on there, and even to ask questions… It was such a nice feeling, to be part of that global research community and to participate in the Toronto event while sitting here in an auditorium at IBM in Dublin. I was happy to discover that someone blogged that event – here’s the link.
The CASCON blog is aggregating posts from several participants’ blogs; it almost feels like I’ve been there! I was thinking of it as an inspiration for setting up a conference blog for ECSCW’07 – we’ll be hosting it in Limerick!
Going back to the CASCON blog today, I found a very interesting (and painfully true) reflection on CASCON (but it could apply to any other conference!), the incredible amount of enthusiasm and ideas they stir in us, and how these get killed by our inevitable return to our day-to-day lives!
October 23 2006 04:22 pm | Uncategorized