KDD-2018 in London
After having my paper accepted for the 2018 WISDOM workshop at the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) conference in London, I felt both nervous but excited!. Arriving early Saturday afternoon, I was glad to find that the hotel booked for me was only a two-minute walk away from the conference venue. Once I had picked up my badge and welcome pack, I linked up with a group of researchers for drinks via Whova, which was used to connect researchers during the conference. This allowed me to meet with different people throughout the week and explore London, go for drinks and network.
My presentation was scheduled for Monday morning and as presenting my research at a conference was not something I had done before, I was wondering and a little nervous of how many people would attend my talk and which questions would be asked. In the end, it turned out to not intimidating at all and the audience seemed genuinely interested in my work and there were a number of thoughtful questions and comments about my dataset and the type of neural network I used for training. Afterwards, I was free to enjoy the rest of the conference week and attend other talks, seminars and tutorials. I was particularly excited about a talk by Richard Socher whose work in Natural Language Processing and specifically Sentiment Analysis had inspired my own PhD studies. During his talk, he elaborated on the future challenges of Natural Language Processing at large and how we will need to move away from building task-specific systems towards systems that can solve many tasks at the same time.
Overall, it was fantastic to see so many scientists coming together from different sectors, such as finance or healthcare to discuss challenges and achievements in their respective fields. Another thing that has really struck me was the amount of high-profile companies and people attending the conference. This allowed me to meet and connect with people from various sectors and industries and contributed overall to me having an amazing time at my first conference as a PhD student.
