Friday 7 March 2014

A glimpse of Nantes, the conference and some thoughts

Here I go again folks, updating my blog. It has been a very busy day in the conference. By the time the conference finished I felt very tired mentally. I attended most of the sessions I wanted today except the sessions after 4PM. For most of the sessions I did ask several questions which basically means I did pay attention for most of the sessions. There were many sessions which I think very technical and only one was very easy to follow but lack of technical report in a presentation make you wonder how did the authors do it. Anyway...the thing is the audience know in general how the methodology works. But I think the presentation of the day is the keynote  from University Collage London. It was about a 3D cave reconstruction. It works by flying a device to go through along the cave and as the device flies it takes lots of information about the cave such as surface, angle, interesting points,  edges and many more. By taking all those information the algorithm will manipulate it for the reconstruction purpose. The most interesting part is, one of the caves they tested is the Mulu cave in Sarawak, Malaysia. In fact they are collaborating with some scientists in Malaysia.

Let's talk about the conference. First of all the conference venue facilitates are first class. Secondly, the services provided by the conference committees was superb! Thirdly, the food was really is amazing. The first day of the conference I gave a 7 out of 10 but today it was 8. I must say, although the french don't use much spicy in their cooking they still manage to make their food so tasty. Don't talk about the desserts. It was 8 and 8.5 for yesterday and today, respectively. There were so many biscuits on tables but I didn't really treat myself with those because I knew they are fattening. So far, everything went so well especially the conference but there is one thing I notice which is so different then the rest of the conference I've attended. For all the conference I've been, for lunch the conference committees always invite us to finish the food. But here in France, it's so different because we were only allowed to have once for every course. Today I wondered if the food were actually all finished. So I stayed in the lunch hall till everybody finished. Guess what I found out? There were so much food left and I don't understand what they were going to do with all those food. Such a waste! I mean why can't they just ask us to just finish it (sounds greedy)? Or perhaps they save it for the staffs (this sounds a bit cheeky). So yeah I am a bit disappointed with lunch because the food were really good but we were not allowed to have as much as we can (greedy again).

Okay, now let's talk about Nantes, where the conference is. I am staying in a studio apartment hotel which is very nice because it's clean, free wifi, and  quite spacious. I always make sure my room has unlimited wifi access. There are some expensive hotel rooms don't provide free wifi or internet connection to their guests. Nantes is definitely not a small city. It is actually quite a big one. Before i cam here I thought Nantes is a small city and I could walk around it within a day. I was completely wrong. But this city is not really a place that I would like to visit regularly because there's not much attraction or interesting places here. I think it has a couple of museums here but I am not really into that. I like a place which has something very rare and difficult to find at other places. It has several ancient buildings but many of them are already replaced by new modern buildings. In fact there are quite numbers of modern buildings built  among the old ones.

Food in France is generally very good but I haven't done the whole experiment yet so I can't say much but so far all the food I had in and off conference were really good. Much better than the ones I had in germany and hong kong (but the food on streets in hong kong were really good).

So tomorrow will be the last day of the conference. But I will only attend half day. I hope some of the people in the conference will be free so I can see the other side of the river in Nantes.


I was searching a conference about medical image analysis yesterday and I found two or three of them which will be held in September and November. So, most probably I will be submitting/writting a couple of papers by because June or May (I have very high expectation here!). For my PhD before i'm planning to write up my thesis (in 3 years), I would love to have 7 conference papers and 2 journals. But that is my highest expectation. My lowest expectation would be 5 conference papers and 1 journal. My other top expectation is to submit a journal into number 1 journal in medical image analysis. But this is very difficult indeed. I'm not sure if I can achieve this but I will definitely do my very best because having a journal published in a number 1 journal in the world in medical image analysis would give a huge boost to my CV in my academic career. Anyway...stop about blogging..I think it's time to go to bed. I am tired and just finished watching the all england badminton 2014. Interesting matches and would love to see some good results tomorrow. Okay folks..night night....p/s: unedited xx

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