ConFigures

Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 2006

Jeff Heard’s review last week of his favorite paper from CIKM 2006 reminds me that I never got around to writing up the same ACM conference I attended in November (it was in DC … the next one’s overseas, out of my reach).  I looked around to see if anyone had saved me the work and found one event blogger who went to a number of the same talks I did:  hurray for Frank McCown’s report of day 1, days 2 and 3, and finally day 4 which was actually the Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM 2006).  Fortunately for me, it turns out we went to a number of the same talks.  The talk McCown gave at WIDM, “Coarse-grained Classification of Web Sites by Their Structural Properties” was one of the more interesting papers I heard at the conference.  I’ll talk about a few others in another entry.

One cool thing this conference did was give an hour for poster presenters to present a couple of slides each on what they were going to talk about.  With something like 50 posters, it was very helpful to watch and listen to their soundbites, so I could mark up the poster list (I’d printed it out before attending – it wasn’t distributed in the onsite materials), highlighting some discoveries, and crossing off others which had sounded good (for me) from the titles alone. 

Stats:  there were about 100 attendees, 85% men / 15 % women (by my eye).  Speakers:  Many academics, followed by a fair number of practitioner companies (Microsoft Research Asia, Yahoo, Fuji Xerox).  A few consumers (NIH, me) were just there to soak up what we could.  Perhaps a simple majority of the speakers were from the US, but China wasn’t far behind, then Germany-India-Japan-Taiwan-Italy, and some folks from Canada and Greece.

Weaknesses of presentations:  All too many papers at CIKM were given by substitutes (not the authors) who were unable to respond substantively during Q&As.  Or perhaps I just picked badly; there were usually several paper sessions going on (multi-track).  Too many (1 is too many!) pointless animated slides.  Occasional sociotwaddle (painful when folks wander outside their expertise that way), and in one instance, conclusions drawn from tiny samples and ad hoc methodologies.