Report on a conference
Just finished the morning session of the international conference on information technology for education 2010. Generally speaking, I’m disappointed at the organization skills and the content of the conference.
They started an hour late (9am instead of 8) and even so, they used the first hour to let the sponsoring organizations advertise themselves. Boring, and they haven’t provided us a single bottle of water. The tea break only has some cheap snack, coffee and soya. The tea is too bitter, it’s not something you can hold and sip while talking to someone else.
The technical presentation brings nothing new either. The first, G-system from a university in Canada is about linking everything to create an “internet of things”. Translate into normal English: ubiquitous computing. It’s not something that you need to goto Canada to do. It’s really just as simple as making a new command for Mozilla Ubiquity. If that presentation is to attract student to canada, I would say they haven’t chosen the best representative for their education.
The second keynote, a datamining report from the head of computer science dept. At NUS, my previous dream school. Well, it’s not so dreamy anymore. Hearing him talk about splitting set and reducing sample all I can feel is a non-functional (in academic speak: conceptual) version of a spatial database. I have never agreed with PhD comics like that before. Their best research is esentially fruitless, despite the $50 million funding they got from companies each year.
The third speech is about internet trends. The translator seems to be a representative for the speaker’s company. The guy keeps making stuff up during the translation using his prior knowledge about the speaker. The speech, in sort, describe stuff that i have been tumblr-ing for the past year. Nothing new again.
Fourth speech, a PhD working for Dell’s R and D dept., opening a college in Vietnam (and I guess the fee will be sky high). It’s the same old blame on education: you cannot do anything right after you graduated. I would say bullshit! If you are so good you should have thought if something better than that.
Yeah, so rounded up: I don’t feel this conference is really presenting any useful work here, another day wasted in commute between countries while they actually could have used it to do real work.