My First AGU Experience
(This post was supposed to be posted a month ago. But I had some trouble accessing the TW weblog website when I was in China, so I have to post it now after I came back to Troy.)
AGU 2011 Fall Meeting was the first time I went to an academic conference. I was very excited when I learned I’ve got such an opportunity. My goals were to present our poster, to check out what it is like in such a conference, and to have an idea about what other people are doing in the Informatics area.
My poster was about the work with Eric Rozell on the temporal metadata modeling in VSTO. I presented its motivation and methodology to several people, and it certainly drew some interest. Our approach has been viewed as an effective way to deal with a large amount of data and to improve reasoning and searching capacities. It was suggested that a similar technique (in the sense of including the temporal range for a dataset to a granularity of days using time:DateTimeInterval) has been used for data indexing in relational databases in NASA. In terms of the presentation, I think putting our posters, publications, and demos into flash drives and distributing them to people was a very good idea. It greatly helped the interested audiences to understand our work more afterwards.
There were many other interesting work across a couple of sessions. For example, Nicholas Del Rios etc. from University of Texas at El Paso presented a semantic and provenance aware visualization framework (VisKo) that links data with visualization processes. It has been used to visualize data on behalf of Giovanni. It is able to capture data processing provenance and visualization provenance in PML. Besides posters, I also went several talks from different sessions. Though I failed to connect most of them to my research work, I thought it was nice to hear about what other people have been working on.
Another output for me was to meet people in the Earth Science and Informatics areas. Although the names I could remember were limited, what I saw was they are a group of people who show enthusiasm about their work. They believe in what they are doing and have the confidence in the accomplishment their work will bring. I really look forward to working with many of them.
To sum up, this was a great experience for me in the beginning stage of my Ph.D. career. Next time I will try to meet and talk to more people, and get more feedback about my own work.