Journey of my first physical conference

27 January 2023

by Jessie Leong
PhD student from the School of Information Technology

In October 2022, I had my first experience attending a physical conference. It all started a year ago when my supervisors and I worked on a new research direction for my PhD. After considering the research area and submission deadline, the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) was the perfect venue to showcase our work. Most conferences have been online for the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that it was my first experience, I only thought about how it would be if the paper were accepted. Little did I know that the conference would be held physically in France — which added to my excitement!

The submission deadline for the conference was around February 2022, and the results were released in May 2022. Fortunately, the paper was accepted, and I travelled to France to present my work. The 29th IEEE ICIP was held in Bordeaux, France, from 16-19 October 2022. I arrived at Bordeaux Airport after 19 hours of travelling. France no longer enforced the need to quarantine by then. It was a sign that things were slowly returning to how they were before COVID-19. I took some time to familiarise myself with the lovely city upon arrival.

The trip started with a welcome reception near the Water Mirror. It was a social event where the attendees could mingle and chat with each other. A variety of cheese and desserts were served, and live band performances were present. It was a good way of relaxing after long hours of travel.

The event officially started the next day at Palais 2 l'Atlantique. It was a three-day event where different sessions were arranged for oral and poster presentations. Different sessions were ongoing in parallel — it was a shame I could not attend them all. I had a poster presentation, and it was scheduled for the last session of the last day of the conference.

The best thing about attending a physical conference is that you get to have face-to-face discussions. Besides that, you get to meet the researchers you've looked up to or that you've been heavily citing their works. During my poster presentation, I received constructive advice from researchers in my research area. I also saw hot topics from different research areas.

One of the most important things I learned from this experience is not to restrict the discussion within your research community. Chatting with people from different research backgrounds is inspiring because new ideas can happen anytime. There's just so much to learn from the conference, such as new ideas, how to present them and how to address the audience's questions.

In short, being there for a week and meeting with all the fantastic researchers made me reflect on my responsibility and how important it is to be passionate about your research topic. This experience was memorable, and I can't wait to see what comes next!