Earlier this week, I attended the ACM Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) conference in Washington, DC. A paper I co-authored last summer, which you can find on my page of writings, was accepted as a full paper in the industrial/gov’t track. IBM agreed to send me down for the conference. This is my story.
:: Law and Order “DumDum” sound ::
Before we left Sunday morning, Ramendra and I rented a car. Sadly, it turned out to be a Crown Victoria, a.k.a a cop car. It drove like a boat, and frequently caused people in front of us to lay on their brakes. We stopped outside of Baltimore for lunch. This community was apparently composed entirely of badly-tanned, shirtless, fat people. They all drove red pickup trucks. I was grateful for the resaturant’s “no shirt, no shoes, no service” policy.
We stayed at the lovely Hilton in DC. I stole mucho shampoo. The conference consisted of guest speakers, workshops, tutorials, paper presentations, poster presentations, and a few meals. I asked Ramendra to do our paper presentation, since I had never been to a conference before and wanted to get a feel for it before I gave a talk. Incidentally, I’m fairly sure that I was the youngest person there (and certainly the youngest co-author).
On Monday evening, there was a dinner and reception. At the beginning of the conference, every person was given two red tickets, each of which was for a free drink. My mentor doesn’t drink, so he gave me his tickets. Later on, some random guy tossed an extra ticket on my table. In the end, I had a beer, brandy, martini, cosmopolitan, and a margarita. It was really funny discussing event-filtering methodology with a professor while thoroughly pissed. Ramendra insists I was coherent. I took pictures, and I’ll post them as soon as I get moved into my dorm.
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August 29th, 2003 at 9:37 am
I drive a 93 crown vic and I love it, despite the letters F, O, R and D and the occasional puff of smoke. Boaty perhaps, the trick is to “hold on losely” and drive it hard. It can be surprisingly manuverable and has power to spare. That is all.
August 30th, 2003 at 1:36 am
You’re also a psycho, Dave. THAT is all.