I arrived on Sunday morning and missed volunteer training Saturday night so I had to get caught up on Sunday morning but it was pretty quick. There wasn't much you needed to know to do the job. Sunday I had two tasks: registration and then the poster area.
This is the poster area which was in front of the registration desk. At registration we had a lot of people come by looking for free home depot coupons. We had to point them down the hall. They were pretty easy to pick out from the conference goers. At one point a lady came up and asked for "scotch" with some European accent. I had seen her name tag as a member of the conference but the other guy had not. He tried to tell her this wasn't part of the casino, but I cut in and asked "Do you mean scotch tape?" and luckily she did.
On Monday morning VAST started and I had to give a one minute fast forward preview presentation along with everyone else presenting. I was so nervous I froze up halfway through, but I had a cue card and the ten sentences ingrained in my head so I got through it. Unfortunately I don't think we got the laugh we wanted. This is the room where I presented. The sessions of VAST were pretty interesting but the topics varied quite a bit. I think there was more useful talks for me at InfoVis. The part of our software that I am working on is the InfoVis part so it makes sense.
On Tuesday morning I had to present and I was still quite nervous but I sat up in front of everyone well the guy before me presented so I think I became less nervous by the time I had to speak. I was told I did a great job presenting and during the rest of the week a few people came up to me and wanted to know more about our work. Andrew, another student from our lab took this shot of me while I presented.After my presentation and a few after, I went out to lunch with my two supervisors for my masters and the keynote speaker for the following day for InfoVis and Vis. He's also the author of one of the text books used in my class. Apparently he has been in the Antarctic tracking whales. They stick tags on them with suction cups to track their movements for about a day before the tag falls off.
On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday morning I did a lot of volunteering but was able to catch some InfoVis talks in between or sometimes while volunteering, since there was one volunteer in each room. I got to meet some other student volunteers from around the US and other parts of the world and I got to talk to some people whose papers I'd read. I went out for dinner with another one of the professors from my school, a couple students from my lab and a guy who worked on some software I'd used called Tableau. It was good to be able to talk to him about some new things in the software that I had read a paper on that were related to our project. He also gave me a geeky Tableau t-shirt that says "Party with your data".
On Wednesday night was the reception dinner. It was the Vis conferences 20th anniversary so there was lots of jokes made that you had to have been around a long time to get. There was also a fashion show involving some of the other volunteers strutting across stage wearing previous versions of the conference shirt.
On Thursday night there was the student volunteer party. One of the guys in charge of the conference had this large room as part of his hotel suite and we had it for the evening. We were also given lots of alcohol, pizza and wings. Some fun mingling and chatting ensued and I met people from all over.All in all the conference was an excellent experience and one I'd like to repeat. It happens every year in October, but if I finish my masters in the planned amount of time then I will be done by the next conference. This means it'd be super expensive to go since the student registration price is cheaper and plus you have to be a student to volunteer. However if something comes up in January like an internship I may not finish by then. We'll see. We have plenty of papers we could write about our software.
