Day 7 - Germany, Land of Germans


So, I know this is way late. it was a really busy day. Details as follows:

I woke up at 7:30am and couldn't force myself back asleep. I didn't feel like going over to the conference really early because I knew I would be there all day anyway. So I lounged around my hotel room for a good 3-4 hours. I then made my way over to the conference centre via taxi. The taxis here are awesome. They're all either mercedes benz or volkswagon. They drive pretty crazy usually, but that's uniform across all of Dresden, as it seems. You wouldn't believe how close they drive to each other here. Inches. Centimeters.

So I met up with James and Phil at the centre for lunch. Can't remember if i've talked about this in a previous post, but this conference is pretty cool because you get free lunches on site. And they're pretty good too!

After lunch was the big poster session. Each year there's an hour or so dedicated to a huge poster display in which about 150-200 people create posters for projects they've done and display them. It gives attendees the opportunity to be exposed to work they normally wouldn't and for the poster presenters to talk about their work with other scholars. We had four posters from IU in the session (two from the lab). Here's a couple pics:


Here's James displaying his poster. He looks really happy to be in a cramped space among 300 or so people. It was hot as hell.


Here's Seungjo standing in front of his poster. Seungjo won the top student paper award for the Information Systems division this year with a paper, co-authored by Byungho Park, about pop-up advertising. Congrats!


Here's an overhead shot of the posters. I was actually pretty irritated at this point because right beforehand I went to get some coffee and they had just ran out. If you know me, then you know that's not a good thing.

So at some point later in the day I got to go inside the huge church in the centre of town. This thing was amazing. Kodak and commentary:


This picture really doesn't do any justice. It's really huge and beautiful. The sculptures were amazing.


There was gold all over the place in the church. It would be weird to regularly attend that place.

After a surprisingly smooth business Information Systems business meeting everyone crossed the river toward the InfoSys reception. We had a great time at this and drank lots of beer. There was also consumption of sausages for free. FREE. Everyone then decided to walk back over to the conference hotel and attend the Michigan State party (there's an open bar at this place as well, of course). On the way these were taken:


You can tell some had more to drink than others ;) From left to right: James Watt (?), Makana Chock (Syracuse), Gayle Nandorf (IU), Michael Shapiro (Cornell), Annie Lang (my advisor, IU), Me (I look like a big dork in this photo. yes yes yes..i cut my hair), James Angelini (IU), Phil LeSourd (IU, sorry if i spelled your last name incorectly!), and Julie Fox (on my committee, IU).


Here's an ok pic of the beautiful sunset with the conference centre on the left-hand side.

So the MSU party was fun, but I didn't win a door prize. But I got free German beer, which is always a good thing. After this I walked over to the Graduate Student reception with my friend Vanessa Vega from Stanford. It was pretty fun, but I think I might have made an ass out of myself while talking to a few grad students about the philosophy of science. It's not my fault i'm opinionated! Sorry if i hurt anyone's feelings! Well, not really ;)

Around 2:30am i decided it was time to call it a night. I knew I had a presentation bright and early the next morning. What a great night to decide to party!

That's about it for my Day 7. I apologize for the lack of description in this post. I'm really tired.

br