Conference Overload
Last week was pretty hectic with me attending a lot of conferences. It started with the Modelling 2006 conference from OMG (Object Management Group). The session was about Model Driven Architecture and advances in that field with case studies from organization like Motorola and Infosys. The opening key note was really nice and set the pace for the rest of the session. Overall, the session was quite informative and time well spent.
The next day was a session from NASSCOM about software licensing best practices. It had various consultants come and talk about best practices for maintaining software assets in a company and how to comply with various regulations. There was also a session on software copyright, which was very interesting.
The very next day, I had to attend Microsoft Research's 1st anniversary, called TechVista and this was really an eye opener. It had some of the most eminent brains in the industry like Turing Award winners come and talk about their work in the field of computer science. A few sessions stand out in my mind. The first one was from Sir Tony Hoare (1980 ACM Turning Award Winne). If you do not know him, he is the inventor of the Quick Sort algorithm! The other session was from a Carnegie Mellon professor called Takeo Kanade and he talked about robotics. Man, THIS IS RESEARCH!! The other session that I liked was from the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research Dan Ling. He showed some of the advances done in the area of mobile devices and the demos were really cool. The final session was from Andrew Zisserman from the University of Oxford and it was about finding human faces in video images. Really cool!
Overall, 3 days of various events left me exhausted mentally with the amount of information amassed :-)