Going To Conferences
You should plan on going to at least one major conference per year. It
is a lot of fun, especially after you get to know some of the people,
and it is good for your career. You should plan your work ahead so that
you have a paper ready when the deadline comes around. In the beginning
it might make sense to go to a primary conference such as NIPS or AAAI
or GECCO even if you don't have a paper there just to get an idea of
what the atmosphere is like.
Which conference?
You should submit primarily to the best conferences in your area. The
general machine learning conferences, such as NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCAI,
ICLR, ICML, may have acceptance rates below 15% (see
a
list of recent acceptance rates). As a result, the papers in these
conferences tend not to be very diverse, and it may take several
rounds to get a paper accepted. Unless you have a result that is very
mainstream machine learning, it may be better to send to a more
specialized conference with a more reasonable acceptance rate. For
instance, GECCO and Cognitive Science conferences have acceptance
rates in the 30s---a publication there is still prestigious and likely
to be of good quality, but the rate is high enough to include a
diversity of papers.
IEEE conferences such as ICJNN, CEC, and WCCI, as well as Alife,
Evostar, PPSN, ICDL etc. are possible alternatives: their acceptance
rates tend to be a little too high (over 50%), which means they are
not as prestigious and not all papers are that great. But they may be a
good way to start, especially with a smaller initial result.
Sometimes small workshops (such as those at NeurIPS, GECCO, AAAI, and
IJCAI, and the AAAI Spring and Fall Symposia, and IEEE Symposium
Series on Computational Intelligence), with a focused topic are very
good too, because it is easy to talk to the people in your
area. Summer schools are also a very good way to meet both established
researchers and other students. Papers at such venues aren't very
prestigious, but prestige is not the point. Workshops are intended to
showcase work in progress, and people go there to interact.
What to do at a conference?
The main activity at the conference is not to attend the talks, but to
meet people. That's how you find out what's going on, get new ideas,
and make the contacts that help you in your career. Sure, you go to
those talks that seem the most interesting, but there's really only a
limited number of those that you can absorb. So spend the rest of the
time talking to people. The breaks, lunches, and receptions are the
best times to do that, and most conferences have poster
sessions that are a lot of fun (and often run past midnight...).
It is a good idea to be prepared before you go, i.e. look at the
schedule and identify interesting talks, note who has which papers,
and think of topics you might bring up with people when you meet them.
Conference presentations in AI are usually about 15 or 20 mins + 5
for questions. The talk should follow your paper for the most part,
although it is perfectly fine to include new results obtained after
the paper was accepted. You cannot present all the details in a short
talk, and most people won't be able to follow a very detailed talk
anyway. Try to get a few central ideas through as clearly as
possible. See the page on making
presentations for tips, tools, and guidelines.
A few days before the conference we can schedule an NN-meeting where
you can give a practice talk. We'll give you lots of feedback, and you
can then refine the talk before you leave for the conference.
If you have a poster presentation, you should prepare it well
ahead of time, and spend some effort into making it good. It is not
sufficient to just paste your paper on the board! The department has a
poster printer that allows you to print the whole poster on one piece
of paper. You can then take it with you to the conference in a tube (a
bit of a pain to take on the plane---sometimes you may be able to
print it locally where the conference is).
The poster should have a large title across the top, with the author
names and affiliations below, and the sections should be clearly
organized e.g. on differently-colored background. Each section should
have a large title, perhaps a figure, and one central point in a large
font, and perhaps more details in a smaller font. You need the
organization and titles because a person who walks to the poster
should be able to immediately see what it is all about, you need the
figures so that you can explain it to others, and you need the details
for people who want to study your poster in detail when you are not
there. Again, color will help organize and emphasize ideas on your
poster a lot, so try to make use of it. They can be prepared in LaTex
(there's an example in cs:/u/nn/tex/example/poster), Overleaf,
Keynote, and other software. Take a look at a few previous posters by
the NN Group (click on the "Slides(PDF)" link e.g. on
SFN19 for LaTex,
CogSci22 for
Keynote (with source under "Other"))---they should make the description
above concrete.
Presenting a poster is a little different from presenting a paper
(i.e. giving a talk). People wonder by and make ask questions, and the
discussion can take different directions. However, you need to prepare
a "tour" of the poster as well, i.e. a presentation of a few minutes
(5-10) that goes over the material in the poster in your own
words. When a potential customer stops by, you can then ask them
whether they would like to get the tour.
Travel Arrangements and Expenses
In order to get travel expenses paid (from a grant or otherwise), you
need to turn in request
for travel authorization well in advance. Usually you make your
own arrangements (perhaps using the
Concur travel management
system) and get reimbursed after the trip. So make sure to keep the
receipts!
Travel funding is usually limited so we have to be economical. Book
nonrefundable airfares and register to the conference early so that
you get a cheaper rate. It is usually a good idea to stay at the
conference hotel---it makes it more convenient to participate---but
you may need to share a room with another student to reduce the
expense. Some conferences and the department also has partial travel
grants that you should take advantage of.
Last modified: Sun Sep 25 17:27:48 PDT 2022