Purpose: Co-dine system setup for Ubicomp'11 demo session.
Location: Tsinghua University.
After visiting last march NEC R&D center in Japan and also working as student volunteer in VR 2011, Ubicomp 2011 was my first conference as a attendant. The main purpose of my presence there was the Co-dine system setup, specially the food printer and the moving table, where I have worked during last months.
After the weekend workshops, the conference started on monday, and just in the first session we had our paper presentation, which was great presented by Wei Jun. She received very good comments and feedback in order to continue with this research topic.
During the whole day we were contacting to DHL because we didnt't received our boxes to prepare our demo, but after trying several time, they informed that everything was stucked in the customes so they couldn't get it.
Also on monday was the poster session, where Cute Center got two paper, Co-Dine system and Digital Taste Interface. A lot of people came very interested to know more details regarding two projects, and also we saw a few projects where we found different aspects that could be interesting for other researchs that we are doing now.
Once all the monday's sessions finished, we went to microsoft research building, where they also organized a demo session, actually quite poor for microsoft, most of the projects were presented by single students as their final project degree but not any long-term project with microsoft researches involved.
Transfer data by using microphone and speaker
On tuesday the sessions were slightly different, in my personal opinion, some of them perhaps very technical, where the user evaluation and the methodology used were the key aspects, but for the audience not related with those research areas, quite complicated to see the novelty showed. During the lunch time was the first demo session and we got the same feeling, very techical improvements but not much impact for the general public. In that time we were even more confident in our demo, but we hadn't received our packages yet and the communication with DHL wasn't fluently enough. We did our best and also from the organization, calling to their contacts and even during the night, in the dinner we were still confident to get the things and prepare the demo as fast as possible.
Wednesday we went to the conference very early expecting the packages there and start the setup, but unfortunately we couldn't make it. We were waiting during the whole morning but at the end we only could show the video. Anyway several people came interested in the project, we exchanged the contacts even some of them mentioned that they were a little disappointed because after the paper presentation they were looking forward to our demo.
In conclusion, the experience has been very positive even without being able to setup the demo, we attended a very interesting conference, we did good contacts and also we visited China, in my case the first time, knowing more about the people, the culture and all the historic monuments that they have.