Wednesday 20 February, 2008

My comments on Attending Conferences

Recently it happened that my guide for Matser's Thesis has asked me to give my comments on a non-technical talk on Prof. Raja's paper(IEEE Computers 2008) On "Attending Conferences", below are some of my comments in which I have taken a freedom of expressing my own thoughts.
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  • Most of the teachers in Institutes other than IIT's and some renowned research institutes of the country are not exposed to the research. My voice may seems as if I am complaining about the system, but it is fact that
    1. Most of the Teachers in other colleges are just BE/BTechs, some of them are ME/MTechs
    1. I agree to the fact that for research the qualification does-not matter because if we are exposed to the new open problems then we may come up with some new idea which no one would thought of earlier
    1. But the problem is that As per AICTE(All India Council of Technical Education) these teachers are expected to do teaching for 18 Hrs in a week, apart from this they have to check the assignments, papers of students, keep the attendance record ready at every point of time, and also you don't have a freedom to teach courses of your choice, you are forced to follow the result oriented approach and teach the contents as decided by the University. So they hardly gets any time to pursue some idea or research of their interest.
  • Conference/Technical Talks should be organized for such teachers but at the same time the participants must be ensured by the speakers that if they are interested then they can discuss their ideas with them by taking prior appointments with them. This can really help to someone who is interested in some research area but he do not have somebody with whom he can discuss his research ideas. Who knows by this we may find a very good researcher.

  • About sleeping in the class, I agree with the author that it's a pretty natural and speaker should not feel offended and participant should not feel guilty. At the same time, attendee should try to listen to the speaker carefully and if he has some questions during the lecture he should ask that at that instance only so that he can follow what next the speaker is going to talk about. If he is shy then at-least after the lecture he should get his doubts clear by discussing it off-line.

  • The student participants in a conference must be well-informed about the topic and references so that they can clear the basics of that area. If some reasearch scholars who had worked for 2 or more years can give the talks on basics, the students can follow what researcher is going to say in later talks.

  • Listening is the most important skill while attending conferences, because listening only decides how much we can benefit from the talks in the conferences and it requires lot of patience to listen something, here the difference between hearing and listening comes.

  • I think the success of any conference also depends on the participant-speaker interaction, hence speaker should be available after the talk for sometime around so that if some participant wants to ask something or suggest something then he can do that.

  • For exposure to the current research and intellectual growth of an individual conferences should be organized and participants should participate pro-actively.

These are some thoughts I wanted to share with you. I think rather than expressing the comments on the talk, I have taken the freedom of expressing my own thoughts on the subject.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey panther,
Its really a wonderful paper. Think like I must frequently visit your blog :)
Your thoughts are impressive too :8
-- ashutosh