The ACM/SAC 2008 was held at Fortaleza-CE, Brazil from March, 16th until 20th. The conference achieved the record of 500 participants from 75 different countries participating and discussing the state-of-the-art in computer science. The track sessions ran in five rooms simultaneously during all day with free access for anyone who intends to participate. The most interaction among the participants, however, was observed during the poster sessions due to the fact that they were more relaxed and less formal. The Information Access and Retrieval Track (IAR), in particular, presented many interesting works mainly concerned in the relevance of the searches. Most of works have showed the use of adjacent technologies for increasing the semantics of their mechanisms such as latent semantic analysis, semantic web resources, term selection analysis and the use of location-based spatial queries. Although the track sessions joined people interested in the specific topic of research, at night, dinners contributed for creating a very pleasant atmosphere where participants could narrow relationships and implement the “true” network. In spite of this conference had been considered the biggest one in the history of ACM, a negative point was evidenced by the number of absences, in general, 25% of authors per session did not appear for their presentations, maybe due to the high cost of the flight to Brazil. On the other hand, it was great to see how research in Brazil is well-known and respected abroad. Next year, ACM/SAC 2009 will be held in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. See you there !
These impressions were shared with my roommates Márcio Ribeiro, advised by Paulo Borba (UFPE) and Rodrigo Teixeira, advised by Augusto Sampaio (UFPE). Both also had poster and paper accepted in the conference.
2 comments:
I never been in a SAC conference, however, all the people say that it is a big conference with several topics. However, in my opnion, the problem with big conferences is that we have many sessions in the same time and you have to decide what to see. But, it is a consequence. About your topic, I think that search and retrieval is well explored there and this feedback is important.
On the other hand, I think that conferences in general is having many no show presentations and part of this problem is because of the costs with travel, registration, etc.
Yes Almeida, I agree at all. Also, I have just updated my post with some feedback about the Information and Retrieval Track (IAR).
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