CGWeek Day I

CGWeek day 1 has my head spinning. Attending a mix of conference talks and workshops is something I'm used to in the DB/data mining world, but not in theory conferences. It's refreshing, exhilarating, and exhausting, all at the same time.

There were a number of great talks today at the conference and the workshops -- too many to do justice to. Here are some random thoughts:

• This year, there's a best student presentation award. My student Amirali Abdullah is one of the competitors, so I don't want to say too much about it, but I'll say that everyone uppped their game - the presentations by students were great ! Maybe they should have best presentation awards in general to improve everyone's presentation skills !
• Amir's talk went pretty well (if I say so myself). It was his first conference talk, but I thought it was well above the average (maybe this says something about the average :)). The talk was about approximate Bregman near neighbors.
• Very intriguing paper by Adamaszek and Stacho on the connection between homology structure of flag complexes and matchings that induce maximal independent sets.
• The workshop on geometric learning was fantastic. Lots to think about on multiscale representations, and distances to measures. 
• Jeff Erickson has a four part liveplussing (one, II, trois, fear) of the business meeting
• Most importantly: Rio in 2013 !! Kyoto in 2014 (boo) !! OSU no way (I kid, I kid).
• Even more importantly: Herbert proposes changing the name of the conference to "Symposium on Computational Geometry and Topology". Major concern - what about the sausage ? Audience votes confusedly after Herbert promises a Klein bottle of beer for everyone.