My worst ISMIR moment
ISMIR, the annual Music
Information Retrieval conference is just a week away. I'm really
looking forward to it. It is always a great learning experience, a
super opportunity to meet lots of energetic, and very smart people that
are passionate about music. This year I'll be busy too. I'm
presenting with Oscar a music recommendation tutorial,
two poster sessions (Thierry is doing all the hard work on one of
them), and I am a chair for the session on recommendation. This
will be only my second time acting as a session chair. At last
year's ISMIR I learned about what my duties are as a session
chair. There are really just two things: make sure that the
speakers end on time, and make sure that during the Q&A after a talk
that if no one else asks a question that you ask one. Apparently, every
speaker needs at least one question to feel fulfilled as a
speaker. Easy enough, end on time and ask a question if needed.
It
was in my role as session chair that I had my worst ISMIR moment.
I was doing fine making sure that the speakers ended on time (even when
we had to swap speakers around when one chap couldn't get his slides to
appear on the projector). However there was one speaker who gave a
talk about a topic that I just didn't understand. I didn't grasp the
goal of the research, the methods, the conclusions or the
applicability of the research. All the way through the talk I was
wracking my brains trying to eek out an appropriate, salient question
about the research. A question that wouldn't mark me as the idiot that I
clearly was. By the end of the talk I was regretting my decision to
accept the position as session chair. I could only pray that
someone else would ask the required question and save me from
humiliating myself and insulting the speaker. The speaker
concluded the talk, I stood up and thanked the speaker, offered a
silent prayer to the God of Curiosity and then asked the assembled for
questions. Silence. Long Silence. Really long silence. My worst
nightmare. I was going to ask a question, but by this point I couldn't
even remember what the talk was about. It was going to be a bad
question, something like "Why do you find this topic interesting?" or
"Isn't Victoria nice?". Just microseconds before I uttered my
feeble query, a hand went up, I was saved. Someone asked a
question. I don't remember the question, I just remember the
relief. My job as session chair was complete, every speaker had their
question.
This year, I think I'll be a bit more comfortable
as a session chair. I know the topic of the session quite well
(recommendation), and I know the speakers too, but still, please don't
be offended if I ask you "why do you find this topic interesting?"
LOL :-)
I remember that!
Yes, those questions at the end of the talk are extremely important. One of the first things I usually ask colleagues when they have given a talk at a conference is if they got interesting questions. I think if I'd ever (which might never happen) end up in such a situation I'd try one of the following to end the awkward silence:
- Let the author go over the time limit, and then explain that unfortunately there is no more time for questions, and tell the audience that the speaker will be available in the coffee break fur further discussions.
- Pick up a random item from the "future work" slide (which hopefully is still being displayed) and ask how exactly that would work.
- Ask about the computational complexity.
- I believe I once heard a session chair end the silence at the end of the last talk of his session with something like "It seems everyone is already thinking of the lunch buffet, so lets end this session, and thank our speaker for this very interesting talk one more time."
Posted by elias on September 16, 2007 at 03:40 AM EDT #