Feedback from SSMS 2007
Participants' Feedback
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Overall this has been a very successful SSMS thanks to everyone involved. We, as organisers, could only make sure that the infrastructure was there. The speakers delivered interesting and professional presentations. However, the participants made it a truely interactive and fun event.
The opininion about the organisation of the poster session was divided. While most people thought it was a great way of telling each other about their work, some thought it would have been better to have all posters up throughout the duration of the event rather than splitting it up into sessions.
Some people also suggested to encourage more interaction between the students and lecturers through PhD presentations, public brain-storming sessions, or hands-on demo and exercise sessions. These suggestions should definitely be taken onboard for next year's SSMS.
People would have preferred to have wireless access at the venue (although I think the atmosphere during the lectures was better without people checking their emails) and a higher quality accommodation. We thought it was better to keep registration fees low and to provide full-time catering at the lecture venue instead.
What did you like in SSMS 2007?
- Friendly and stimulating atmosphere
- "Above all I loved the atmosphere of SSMS and the fact that I met a lot of friendly and warm people."
- "The thing I liked the most was the informal way of interacting between participants. Very nice!."
- "A nice opportunity to share knowledge with other PhD students and young researchers. Make the people become more aware of what's going on in areas loosley related to each other's research."
- "I liked poster sessions and opportunities to meet other participants and get to know their work."
- High-level of lectures and presentations (with demos, dynamic and concrete)
- "The lectures were very interesting, useful and professional."
- "From every presentation I got hints on interesting ideas or approaches that probably can be adapted to my area."
- "Overall I was quite pleased with the selection og topics and presenters. I liked that topics where on different levels of semantic architecture. Good diversity..."
- Social events
- Organisation
- "That organizers were really willing to help students in all aspect, even organizing free-time!"
- Glasgow & pubs
- Weather
Which topics/lectures did you like?
This depended very much on the participant's own background. Some preferred the low-level processing side and others the high-level semantics side. There were equal preferences for audio processing and music retrieval, image and video retrieval, semantic retrieval & ontologies, etc. The two most popular lectures/lecturers were:
- Noel O'Connor
- "definitely a very impressive speaker"
- Andrew Zisserman
- "lecture had a good pace and was very dynamic"
Which topics weren't covered?
- how to actually bridge the semantic gap; what to do with multimedia semantics (hypermedia, customisation)
- more detailed introduction to ontologies
- high-level semantics and formalisms (DL, CG, ...)
- multimedia generation by reasoning
- computer vision & machine learning
- text IR; high-level semantics within textual documents; explicit relationships between tectual & multimedia documents
- information visualisation
- users / user studies
- 3D space annotations
- view from industry
Things you would change about SSMS 2007?
- More interaction between students & lecturers; hands-on sessions; brain-storming sessions
- Public workshops
- PhD presentations where students can discuss their work and get feedback (instead of last session; with lecturers from that day's sessions)
- with exercises using the software presented in the lectures
- Less hours of lectures a day
- Distribute printed slides; provide abstract of lectures for pre-study
- Network facilities in the venue (no wirless)
- Poster sessions in separate location, all posters displayed on all days
- Poster evaluation systems (student votes to select shortlist, experts should select from the beginning)
- More free time
- Accommodation
- Weather
Any other comments or suggestions
- Share photos on the Web: go to the SSMS2007 Flickr group and http://groups.google.com/group/ssms07/web/photo-collections
- Collect links to external resources: go to the materials page
Lecturers' Feedback
Please email us if you want to say anything!