I need to be in four places at once. It must be Thursday. It’s parallel sessions hell, with four of the five conferences of the symposium occurring simultaneously. Not only that, but the organizers seem to have purposely scheduled identical topics at the same time and at extreme ends of the conference center. I shouldn’t complain – I need the exercise. In fact it is not a conspiracy to cause me to work off the previous night’s beers, but rather a simple lack of coordination between the conferences. Each conference chair wants to optimize his own conference, which means getting as many papers as possible in his conference, even if some of them really belong in a different conference. Lithography Model Calibration? I saw papers on this topic in every single conference – or rather, I wanted to. I didn’t see them all, because I have not yet perfected the art of being in four places at once.
Funny, this is a conference about making things smaller, but the primary goal seems to be making the conference bigger. I think there are better metrics of success.