It's a Rap!

I know, I know, it's supposed to be "It's a Wrap!", suggesting that APGV is in the books. But, just like upon leaving home for this trip, I woke up with House of Pain's "Top O' The Mornin' To Ya!" rap song playing in my head. Must be that catchy bass line.

Anyway, it is a wrap, and I must say APGV was excellent. With some of these people not showing to SIGGRAPH this year, perception papers moving to APGV (although I heard there will be one or two at SIGGRAPH still this year), and social events drying up (no more MKP dessert party?), why bother going? I think in the off years when APGV isn't co-located with SIGGRAPH (like this year), might as well skip SIGGRAPH (and save some money; SIGGRAPH is getting really expensive lately while its quality is actually decreasing). In 2008 they are co-located and back in L.A. (yawn!), but in 2009 when APGV goes to Crete (that was one popular suggestion and I hope it sticks), I'd rather go there than wherever SIGGRAPH goes. The pic is of the restaurant car of the ICE bahn (Inter-City Express) from Horb to Zurich. Very nice ride, sweetened by a plate of really tasty ice cream and some water. Quite refreshing. The time flew by even faster since it was mostly consumed talking with another researcher in Zurich. So I now know two people there. He had a lot of interesting ideas that I hope can lead to future APGV papers.

This morning I'm ready to go catch the train connection between the Hauptbahnhof and the Flughafen. The train leaves in about 1 hour, then I should still have about 2 hours lead time at the airport, should be plenty of time to grab a Starbucks. On the plane I guess I need to start working on my keynote talk. At GSP I had a couple of hours wherein I managed to download a bunch of relevant papers that I intend to cover in the talk. At APGV there was a poster that is relevant and that will appear as a 3-pager in the COGAIN proceedings. That would make my talk quite up-to-date as well as provide a nice segue into current work to be presented by those authors as well as myself. My COGAIN paper (with a researcher at UW and CU students) happens to be on the same topic of eye typing! These coincidences (meeting people doing similar work) I think are a direct result of attending events such as APGV. Which just goes to show that one needs to attend these events fairly regularly just to keep abreast with what's happening in the field.

Ok, time to wrap up this post and head out. Cheers!