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Is Attending a CS Conference Worth the Time?
An Anonymous Coward writes"Hello Slashdot readers, I am a CS student nearing graduation and i had a couple of questions. One of my professors is recommending submitting a paper to the CCSC (consortium of computing sciences in colleges) in Utah this year for a chance to have my work published in a journal. I realize the value in having thesis work published but i don't really have the money to travel to Utah and stay for two nights. So i guess i am wondering, has anyone ever attended a conference of this nature and if so was it worth the time and money?"
The main reason to attend these things is to meet people. This can either help you get a job or help find professors to partner with in the next stage of your education.
If you have no interest in either, then the only reason to go is out of your own curiosity.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
apply for travel funding? i got a small travel grant from the royal sociaty in london to travel to a physics conference, they must have similar organisations in the US?
conferences are a great way to find out if what you are doing is worth anything, and for seeing what other people are doing thats similar to you, great place to meet people and learn new things.
You don't say which graduation you are approaching, so I'll guess it's an undergrad. If you are going to continue with graduate work, or otherwise as a researcher, then it's worth it to gain credibility. It's not unknown for people to prefix a paper presentation with "By the way, I'm looking for a doctoral supervisor." This may be one of the best ways to arrange to do your graduate work in your preferred area, since you are talking to a self-selecting audience.
If, on the other hand, you want to make some money and have a career (i.e. not work in academia), you're probably not missing much by not going. You might still submit if your professor has funding to send you. Or, if the professor in question was going to attend this conference anyhow, then you could ask if he/she would be willing to present it in your place. A published paper might look good on your CV right out of school; at least it would give the interviewer something to talk with you about.
Unless you want to go (you don't sound like it), tell your prof you can't afford it. If s/he really wants you to go, let them find the money for it.
Agreed. Universities are usually willing to sponsor students who submit their work to conferences if the work is of exceptional value because they improve the reputation of the university in the research world. So if you can get a free (or cheap) way to go to Utah and represent your university, you'll also get the chance to network with companies or research institutions that could benefit your career. It never hurts to have a publication on your CV -- even in the business world.
If you get the chance to go to a big, fancy conference in an area that actually interests and inspires you, then you should definitely take it. I went to SIGGRAPH as an undergrad when I was vaguely interested in computer graphics (before starting grad school in the same field) and it was an awesome experience, both the technical presentations AND the social aspect. I hung out with old classmates, new classmates, and went to parties at swanky clubs exclusively for the conference attendees (none of those regular-people riff-raff)... It definitely solidified my interest in graphics and grad school.
Honestly, though, this CCSC conference looks kind of boring. Is it education related? I can hardly tell. I'd worry that it is too vague/too general and if you went, you'd risk not actually being interested in anything anyone said. Make sure you care at least a little bit about what the conference is actually about, and then yes! Go and meet people and have a good time! The point of a conference is to meet people interested in the same stuff as you.
Additional point: If you intend to apply to grad school, having work published anywhere helps these days.
I usually don't have to add comments to items on /., as usually the right answer or comment is already there. But, in this case, it's not.
I am one of the decision-makers on hiring at my company, as VC-funded startup. (If you like, come interview; we're profitable and hiring). Having a publication is a very good thing for *your entire life*, and it's often something you only get a chance to do young. Yes, when you're young, the cost seems high. But, relative to your future income, it is a drop in the bucket. Lost weekend, $500 flight, $300 hotel... Borrow it from a 30- or 40- something who trusts you, and pay it back over a year.
Why is it such a good thing? It's irrelevant who you meet there. Maybe you'll get lucky, but, it's not likely. The value is in company you share by being a published author. Software company decision-makers often went to CS grad school, and like to hire people who they can relate to! They will have pubs, you will have a pub. Simple as that.
The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much.
I have to second ren-n-stimpy's comment as someone who did NOT take advantage of such an opportunity, and further second that this might be your only chance to publish. Do it!
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1432
That would be "substantially all conferences." Unless you're an invited speaker at a truly major conference, e.g., the after-lunch or after-dinner speaker, or maybe the keynote speaker opening the conference, you won't be getting any of your expenses paid by the conference. The economics don't support it: Most conferences are actually closer to workshops, in that a substantial fraction of the attendees are also presenting papers. Paying for each others' travel would only raise the conference registration fees to unacceptable levels, and guarantee that no non-presenter would be able to attend.
*Did they publish the abstracts in advance? Usually you can get a feel if a conference is worth it based on the topics to be presented. If there are a few papers that look interesting, I would say it's worth it.
*Are there any speakers of note? I have found getting the perspective of folks that have remained in the career field for a while to be invaluable. I may not agree with everything they say/so, but a lot of times there are some insights that help with my research, or at least give me an idea of a sub-specialty NOT to pursue.
*Expanding on the networking comments above, a lot of times the other presenters are available before/after their talks. I've make a lot of good connections that have helped me from an academic/professional perspective up to collaboration on projects. As a student, my advice is to use the opportunity to get a deeper understanding of topic areas you are interested in, if possible.
*Experience presenting: I emphasize this with all of the younger folks on my team. The ability to articulate your research will directly translate into more opportunities for research, and in some cases translate into funding. This sounds like it might be an opportunity to get some practice. Not all great computer scientists have that ability.
OTOH, if none of the above apply, see if they will be publishing the proceedings and get a copy. It's probably cheaper.
"Hey, I know what we're gonna do today." -- Phineas Flynn
I *absolutely* advise you to go!
Why? In short: experience, connections, fun. Please read on.
I was in exactly the same spot one year ago - just finished my undergraduate thesis, was able to publish it as a paper at ICSE conference and had to decide if I wanted to go. Also, I had the same money problems: ICSE 2010 was in Cape Town, South Africa, the whole trip summed up to well over 2000$.
For the money $$$: try to get some funding. Both ACM and IEEE (I guess your conference is part of one of those, right?) have funding programs exactly for these situations - young people who'd like to go to a conference and can not afford it. Myself I got a funding for 1500$ by ACM SIGSOFT (Special Interest Group for Software Engineering). The rest I could convince my professor to pay. Also I'm sure your University has some funding program, so make sure to check that out. (Apply for funding at a lot of different places, it is a lot easier to get funding if those people know they only have to pay you some small amount instead of the whole trip.)
The conference itself was great. You get a real look into the world of CS research. This will help you a lot in your decision if this is actually your future path. Also, the younger you are when you attend a conference, the more it impresses people. (Last year I was one of only a hand full of undergrad students at ICSE, people were quite impressed that I got there.) ... After the conference I was for example contacted by a recruiter from Google who asked me for an interview. It didn't work out in the end, but still, I was very happy that this happened and it shows how things can work out if you are confident and have a bit of luck.
At a conference you can collect a lot of 'weak links' - those those are the ones that will help you get jobs, research positions, funding,
Even if no such connections work out in the end, I am of the opinion that publishing at and attending a conference is a very valuable addition to your CV. It might have nothing to do with your future job, but still - you did serious work, you presented it in front of a lot of people - it shows that you are committed!
Last but not least, attending a conference can be a lot of fun. Grab the interesting people you meet over the day and go get dinner with em, hang out, booze up. It will be really refreshing, and of course further improve your chances of gaining good contacts that might at some point in your career be very helpful.
At the very, very most submit your paper. You can still decide not to go, but at least you will know if your paper would have been accepted, and you get some professional feedback from important research heads.
Hope this helps out - best of luck, .f
Should you go, or should you submit a paper?
These events, while they can be expensive are worthwhile for all the reasons above. However, submitting a paper is quite a few steps away from paying for flights, accommodation etc.
If you think you meet the brief outlined in the call for papers - my advice is to submit one. Especially if you have work that is already done and can be easily adapted. You need to be accepted. Possibly edited, then approved etc etc before you actually worry about getting there. Only once your work gets you that far should you worry. If it looks positive, see what your professor can help with. If you are asked to present at a conference, I would suggest you do everything you can to get there (often your conference attendance is free for presenters), so take advantage of the opportunity to show what you know and how good you are.
Of course, if your paper is not accepted then you don't normally need to attend, and you're only out of pocket your time, so what's the worry?
BTW, a conference publication isn't considered a "journal" publication, and doesn't confer the same status.
In most of CS, conference publications are actually more prestigious than journals. Top conferences such as PLDI, OOPSLA/Splash, Usenix ATC, ICSE and so on are highly selective, difficult to get into, and look very good on your CV (if you're pursuing an academic career). By contrast, journal articles tend to be published almost as an afterthought, years after anybody still cared about the research in question.
I have got all my jobs after my PhD from people i meet at conferences. I didn't kiss arse, i was "me" both with respect to the social activities and the professional talks/work. I know my field so when i meet people I generally know what they have done, otherwise i just ask and we talk "shop". It is not hard to work out who will be a good boss and who will not, if what they work on is interesting or not. Also they quickly work out if you are going to be a good post doc or not.
Now when you apply for a position you are not just a name on a pile. It really makes a big difference.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
No.
AC is completely right, but the answer is too short. Here is the long answer:
No, but as a professional computer scientist you need to go to conferences because it's part of your job.
Is a publication worth it to an undergraduate, even if it's only published in the conference proceedings? Absolutely, for several reasons:
(1) You have the experience of writing and formatting a technical article.
(2) You have the experience of presenting your technical work in front of an audience.
(3) You get to meet new people in a completely different venue, and can potentially network with future employers and faculty from different universities.
(4) You can have a lot of fun sightseeing or touring the town after hours.
Keep in mind that if you are thinking about going to graduate school, you'll want to submit your work to an archival journal after the conference, as conference proceedings don't count for much in the hard-line academic world. For someone at your level, however, it's still a good experience even if you take a job immediately after graduation.
However, having said all of that - you should not be paying your own expenses. If your professor is pushing you to attend, then he or she should be willing to pay for it. Some schools also set aside money for students in your situation; check with the Dean's office and see if you can apply for a travel stipend.
Nowadays, conference registration fees plus travel plus hotel room plus meals can easily hit a couple of thousand dollars. That's a lot of money for a student to pay out of pocket. Yes, going to a conference is worthwhile, but (in my opinion) not that worthwhile. If your work is really that good, you can get most of the benefit at a tiny fraction of the cost by submitting it directly to a journal.
Get a bus ticket. Stay in a cheap motel or a hostel. You can afford this. Meeting people is always worth it if you do a small amount of work to maintain your connections. Why pass up an opportunity in this economy?
Put aside this particular conference. Ask yourself: if you were going to spend a thousand bucks on improving your job prospects, what would be the best use of that money? It's unlikely that this particular 2-day talk-fest would be the answer (unless it's *very* exclusive and your prof. is pulling some strings to get you in). In my real-world experience, conferences are basically just jollies. People are there either as a "reward" or recognition of something, since it's cheaper than a pay rise and comes from the training budget not the salary/bonus budget - or as a bribe if they're disaffected or missed out on the last couple of days away from work. In a few months time nobody who attended that conference will remember you - unless you present your paper naked. Whereas if you spend the same money wisely on other self-promotions or personal-improvement schemes they will last a lot longer.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
BTW, a conference publication isn't considered a "journal" publication, and doesn't confer the same status. Conferences are where the work gets done: people present developing ideas and get feedback on them.
Not in CS. In Computer Science, it is far harder, traditionally, to get a submission accepted for presentation at a conference, along with later publication in the proceedings, than it is to get a submission in a journal.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
This is incorrect for most of Computer Science.
Citeseer has rankings of publication venues for CS. All the top venues are conferences. BTW, the same is not true for Electronic Engineering though - in EE, journals carry more weight. This is always a bone of contention in fields that span both CS and EE.
Of course there are also plenty of useless conferences in CS, where no-one will ever read your paper, and you won't meet anyone interesting if you attend. The impact rating serve as a rough guide to where is likely to be interesting, but they're no good for new venues.
My citation count is currently around 25,000 according to Google Scholar or 7000 according to Citeseer, which uses a different methodology. So I'm probably doing something right. But I'm not in the top 100 most cited authors, so this also shows that there must be an awful lot of publications appearing somewhere. Have to assume most of those are rarely read.
From an academic perspective it is absolutely worth to publish and to attend conferences.
The goals as a researcher are to get known and to announce your work.
In CS you don't submit your work to journals (as in Biology or Physics or Math) but you present your work at conferences. At conferences you meet other people and you also have a chance to discuss new strategies and new ideas. CS is a very open field and it is hard to get in contact with other people. Conferences are venues where you meet the people that you collaborate with.
One true fact is that conferences are not really worth it if you only go for the talks. Most talks are bad and it is sometimes hart to understand the speaker at all. Additionally you can read the papers after the conference anyway. But at conferences you have all these coffee breaks and the other opportunities to meet other great people in your field.
So you should see conferences as a possibility to meet a potential future advisor or collaborator.
Look, this is ./. It is not important whether you post first or not, whether you post soon or late. What's important is that your comment is thoughtfully pondered; describes in painful detail some personal habit of yours nobody else cares about; and demonstrates thorough knowledge of some technology or process that most people are happily oblivious about, and is completely offtopic. Bonus points if you start a flamewar with it.
Mostly harmless.
While you didn't explicitly state it, many others pointed out how you can use a conference to "make connections" to get a job. The whole "networking" deal really annoys me because generally, you're not going to be having enough time talking to anyone to actually show them how knowledgeable you are - so it pretty much boils down to getting a job because you spent some time ass kissing before you apply for a position. I'm aware it's not how it works in the real world, but I think people should be hired based on their ability to do the job, not to suck up to someone.
So going after a presenter, introduce yourself and genuinely and intelligently comment on his/her presentation (while exchanging credentials) is ass-kissing? Nice socials skills you got there buddy.
There is ass-kissing, and there is professional networking. Smart people know the difference between the two. And then there are the others, neatly divided in two groups: a) those who ass kiss when doing professional networking, and b) those who can't maturely do professional networking and thus assume the act involves (and is equal to) ass kissing (an assumption typically based on inexperience, arrogance and/or social incompetence.)
There's a big overlap in quality between journals and conferences in computer science. A paper at a good conference has a higher impact factor than one in a poor journal. If you get a paper in something like SIGGRAPH, that's better than getting it in almost any of the graphics journals, for example. The same applies to a few of the other ACM and IEEE conferences. In contrast, there are some conferences that rarely publish anything interesting. They're useful to students, because you still get to claim that your work is peer reviewed when you come to defend it before you graduate, but research institutions will count them as being roughly equivalent to a technical report (i.e. you've gone to the effort of writing a paper, but that's about it). There are also a few journals of this quality, but generally they charge for acceptance and there's no point bothering with them unless you're really desperate to get a large number of publications and no one is going to look too carefully at where things are published.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No.
AC is completely right, but the answer is too short. Here is the long answer:
No, but as a professional computer scientist you need to go to conferences because it's part of your job.
What's a 'professional' computer scientist? PARC and Bell Labs are long gone, and I know of no places that actually employ people to do CS work these days. And as a student, I'd hardly call him a professional. It's not like he's getting paid..
If your professor is recommending you go to a conference, I presume their name is on the paper as a 2nd author. So it'll be to their benefit as well if you go to present it. They and/or your university dept will have money allocated to a travel budget precisely for this kind of thing, and will also know of other sources of funding for students to go to conferences.
So the answer is: you need to talk to your professor about money, tell them you'd need funding for the trip and ask if they know of any. Indeed, it's quite possible your professor will say "But of course the dept will pay the expenses!".
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
He's going to Utah. No drinking, no sex, strong religious message. It's kind of like your employer giving you an all expenses paid trip to a convent.