The Maharajalela monorail station is 4 minutes away and the hotel 2 minutes away, so I'd hop down to Berjaya Times Square 2 stops away for dinner.
So what's iiWAS2009 about? Well a bit of everything, given their focus: the Global Information Infrastructure, where "the seamless integration of information and services remains a major challenge towards a vision of semantically rich information and service oriented architecture for global information systems. This vision is at the convergence of progress in technologies such as XML, Web services, RDF, OWL, of multimedia, multimodal, and multilingual information retrieval, and of distributed, mobile and ubiquitous computing". Topics of interest included:
- Web Engineering and Web Services Track
- E-applications Track
- Web Data and Semantic Web Track
- Information Integration in Ubiquitous Computing Track
Yours truly still submitted a paper on NLP, though. To the co-located Master & Doctoral Colloquium. Only 5 papers got accepted out of 21 submissions, so I guess they didn't just let any submissions through easily. In fact they had a shepherding process to make sure that you really have incorporated reviewers' comments in the camera-ready submission...
The MDC Chair, Dr Karin Hummel, also acting as the presentation session Chair, was really friendly, enthusiastic (in a non-scary way, that's always very important) and encouraged feedback and discussion from the audience. So with that kind of friendly vibe, comments and discussions kept flowing, the presenters and audience was full of camaraderie at the end of two hours, and did not mind one bit going to lunch late.
I suppose my paper presentation was well received. The audience attending the session, having no or little background knowledge on NLP, found the topic interesting. One gentleman was initially mildly apprehensive as he perceived that NLP (in particular Machine Translation) researchers are attempting to take over the livelihood of human professional translators and interpreters with half-cooked technology. Luckily I was able to allay his doubts -- which happened to be a common misconception about MT technologies by the general public -- by describing the correct usage scenarios of MT scenarios from my slides. By the end of the discussion, the said gentleman was applauding with comments like "Bravo! Future generations will bless you."
There was a conference dinner on the 2nd night, but with a terrific rain going on, evening KL traffic being what it is, and the guest-of-honour got delayed somewhere, we waited for about 2 hours at the dinner venue at the Pullman Hotel in Putrajaya (I hitched a ride with a colleague from MMU after finishing a discussion there). It was well 8.20pm when we were finally allowed to touch the food. Too famished and tired and with presentations still to be finalised, my colleague and I left early after having just enough... to head back to the hotel where I worked till midnight, having a final glance through my slides, and revising a project grant proposal due the week after. Yawn.
