Conference (snore) Presentations

The annual meeting of the Decision Sciences Institute just wrapped up in normally warm-and-sunny San Diego (which was neither this week). I achieved the dubious first of having to attend three committee meetings in two consecutive time slots (which means I "session-hopped" committee meetings).  Let's see ... I left Lansing MI for cool, rainy weather and committee meetings ... remind me again why.  Two conferences in three weeks is a bit draining, and knowing I'm going home to grading doesn't improve my disposition.

So I'm in the proper frame of mind to make the following observations about conference presentations and sessions, in no particular order:

• Assume that your audience is reasonably smart.  Don't explain the obvious.  If you're presenting a scheduling model for buses, don't spend time explaining to the audience what a bus is.  (That's not exactly what one presenter did, but it's very close.)  If your audience is really that clueless, they won't understand your presentation anyway (and quite likely they're in the wrong room).
• Session chairs should enforce time limits ruthlessly.  If people want to discuss the paper with the author and the author has exhausted his/her time allocation, they can do so after the session.  Besides facilitating session hopping (the least important reason for this, in my opinion), it provides an incentive for authors to shorten their presentations.  Also (and this is frequently overlooked), it's harder for the next presenter to gauge how much time they have left when they start at an off-cycle time in a session that's already behind schedule.
• The DSI meeting was plagued by no-show presenters (including one session where I went only to hear one paper -- the one that ended up not being presented).  Occasionally a presenter is missing due to illness or death in the family (the latter happened to me once at a conference).  Sometimes their funding falls through at the last minute.  More often they just wanted to get in the proceedings, or they saw they were scheduled for the rump session and decided not to bother. I'm generally inclined to believe that a no-show presenter actually did the audience a favor: if they weren't committed to showing up, how committed were they to doing a good job preparing the presentation?
• As a presenter, less is more.  (And I confess to screwing this one up myself at the Austin INFORMS meeting.)  Leave time for feedback.  Other than the minor value of another line on your vita and the major value of qualifying you for travel funds, the main virtue of presenting a paper is to get feedback from the audience.  Dazzling them with your brilliance is beside the point, since the (presumed) future publication in a (presumed) top-tier journal will accomplish that.
• Graphs are good; tables of numbers are not.  Tables of numbers in 4 point font (because that's what it took to fit all the numbers on one slide) are even less useful (other than to audience members who have not been sleeping well at their hotels).
• If your slides include any complete paragraphs (other than memorable quotations), say goodbye to your audience.  They'll be off catching up on e-mails.  If you are reading those complete paragraphs to your audience, they'll be busy e-mailing they sympathies to your students (who presumably suffer the same fate, but more regularly).

'Tis the day before Thanksgiving here, and if my (delayed) flight actually manages to make up the lost time and not blow my connection in Atlanta, I will truly be thankful.  To those of you celebrating the holiday, have a good one!

INFORMS Debrief

The national INFORMS meeting in Austin is in the rear-view mirror now (and I'm staring at the DSI meeting in San Diego next week -- no rest for the wicked!), so like most of the other bloggers there I feel obligated to make some (in my case random) observations about it.  In no specific order ...

• The session chaired by Laura McLay on social networking was pretty interesting, particularly as we got an extra guest panelist (Mike Trick joined Anna Nagurney, Aurelie Thiele and Wayne Winston, along with Laura) at no extra charge. Arguably the most interesting thing from my perspective was the unstated assumption that those of us with blogs would actually have something insightful to say. I generally don't, which is one reason I hesitated for a long time about starting a blog. 
• On the subject of blogs, shout-out to Bjarni Kristjansson of Maximal Software, who more or less badgered me into writing one at last year's meeting. Bjarni, be careful what you wish for! :-)  It took me some digging to find Bjarni's blog (or at least one of them). Now if only I could read Icelandic ...
• I got to meet a few familiar names (Tallys Yunes, Samik Raychaudhuri ) from OR-Exchange and the blogosphere.
• Thanks to those (including some above) who've added my blog to their blogrolls.  The number of OR-related blogs is growing pretty quickly, but with growth come scaling issues. In particular, I wonder if we should be looking for a way to provide guidance to potential readers who might be overwhelmed with the number of blogs to consider. I randomly sample some as I come across them, but if I don't see anything that piques my interest in a couple or so posts I'm liable to forget them and move on, and perhaps I'm missing something valuable. This blog, for instance, is mostly quantitative (math programming) stuff, but with an occasional rant or fluff piece (such as this entry).  I wonder if we could somehow publish a master blog roll with an associated tag cloud for each blog, to help clarify which blogs contain which sorts of content.

Getting off the social network tram for a bit ...

• A consistent bug up my butt about INFORMS meetings is their use of time. Specifically, the A sessions run 0800 to 0930, followed by coffee from 0930 to 1000. There is then an hour that seems to be underutilized (although I think some plenaries and other special sessions occur then -- I'm not sure, as I'm not big on attending plenary talks). The B sessions run 1100 to 1230 and the C sessions run 1330 to 1500. So we have an hour of what my OM colleagues call "inserted slack" after the first coffee break, but only one hour to get out of the convention center, find some lunch and get back. It would be nice if the inserted slack and the B session could be flipped, allowing more time for lunch. My guess is that the current schedule exists either to funnel people into plenaries (who might otherwise opt for an extended lunch break) or to funnel them into the exhibits (or both).
• We're a large meeting, so we usually need to be in a conference center (the D.C. meeting being an exception). That means we're usually in a business district, where restaurants that rely on office workers for patronage often close on Sundays (D.C. and San Diego again being exceptions). Those restaurants that are open on Sunday seem to be caught by surprise when thousands of starving geeks descend en masse, pretty much all with a 1230 - 1330 lunch hour. For a society that embraces predictive analytics, we're not doing a very good job of communicating those predictions to the local restaurants. (Could INFORMS maybe hire a wiener wagon for Sundays?)
• The layout of the Austin convention center struck me as a bit screwy even without the construction. For non-attendees, to get from the third floor to the fourth floor you had to take an escalator to the first floor (sidebar: the escalator did not stop at the second floor), walk most of the length of the facility, go outside and walk the rest of the length, go back inside and take an escalator to the fourth floor (sidebar: this escalator did not stop at either of the two intervening floors). Someone missed an opportunity to apply the Floyd-Warshall algorithm and embed shortest routes between all nodes in the map we got.
• The sessions I attended ranged from fairly interesting to very interesting, so I have absolutely no complaints about that. I also had good luck networking with people I wanted to see while I was there. Since sessions and networking are my two main reasons for attending a conference (my own presentation ranks a distant third), it was well worth the trip.

The conference, like all its predecessors, allowed me to collect some new observations that add to the empirical evidence supporting my theories of Geek Physics (which depart from classical Newtonian physics in a few regards). In particular:

• A geek in motion will come to rest at the location that maximizes interdiction of other traffic (particularly purposeful traffic).
• A geek at rest will remain at rest until someone bearing a cup of coffee enters their detection range, at which point they will sharply accelerate on an optimized collision course.
• A geek entering or exiting a session in progress will allow the door to slam shut behind them with probability approaching 1.0. (Since I have no empirical evidence that geeks are hard of hearing, I attribute this to a very shallow learning curve for things outside the geek's immediate discipline, but I'm having trouble collecting sufficiently specific data to test that hypothesis.)

If anyone has observed other laws of Geek Physics that I'm missing, I'd be interested in hearing them.

Enough about the conference, at least for now. It was interesting, I enjoyed interacting with some people I otherwise only see online, and I brought home a bunch of notes I'll need to sort through. I'm looking forward to next year's meeting.