The conference officially started this morning, but neither Reid nor I went. After looking at the abstract for the opening keynote address, we decided that your time would be better spent going the Shanghai Museum. From the feedback we got later about the talk, we made the right choice.

Today was the Doctoral Symposium. For those who are unaware, large academic conferences often have a symposium where doctoral students at varying levels of completion can present their work and get feedback from a panel of other academics. When I learned that my paper had been accepted, I figured that I would also try to [...]

Things are going better now that the conference has started. I spent the day in a work shop on mining software repositories, which turned out to be pretty good. Of course the talk quality ranged quite a bit, but that is par for the course. In the afternoon they had a series of ‘lightening talks’ [...]

I have decided that I don’t like Shanghai. After spending the day walking around the city, it is a noisy, dirty, polluted, unattractive, and hot city. While I did visit one interesting area, the crowds there turned me off. If this is representative of China, which I assume it is, I have no desire to [...]

I made it to China! For a while it looked like I wouldn’t be allowed into the country, but I’ll get to that later.