last week, I attended the ASME IDETC 2009 in San Diego, CA– a veritable buffet at which anyone with $500 and a stomach for endless lectures can learn about the newest research going on in the field of mechanical engineering. while ASME stands for “American Society of Mechanical Engineers,” duly note that the I in IDETC stands for International, and that is largely the constituency that this conference had in attendance. Not that this is a problem– a lot of good research is being done internationally and the ASME conference is a great place to publicize that research– it’s not a problem at least until you start having lectures which are read directly from slides and are completely incomprehensible.
I’ve sat through thousands of lectures in college at this point (I’ve actually calculated this; on average 4 classes/semester, 2.5 lectures/week/class, 16 weeks/semester, 10 semesters = 1600 lectures, not including the many guest lectures/seminars/symposia i’ve attended– and don’t hawk me for my units not working, the calculation makes sense). Many of these lectures given in college are delivered by professors, and at both UC Berkeley and Cornell, many of those professors are not American-born. I have had my fair share of sitting through lectures delivered by professors of different nationality or origin, but I really think they’re quite effective for the most part. However, this conference was very different– there were some lectures where I simply could not understand what the speaker was saying. Lost but still hopeful, I would turn to the presenter’s presentation slides as a lifesaver. In fact, this generally was just an incomprehensible mess of equations, formulae, figures, and text overlapping and creating an in general impossible-to-follow presentation.
And so many of these presentations wound on for hours each day, with my amazement at how difficult some of the lectures were to follow finding new depths by the session. Armed with the fear of my own presentation being so bloodily incomprehensible, I spent the evenings in my hotel room making change after change to try to build on what I saw as the shortcomings of others, and I think that helped a bit. However, as I delivered my own talk in front of my modestly sized audience, I couldn’t help but feel I was delivering the same shoddily-wrapped package of “cutting-edge” science as so many of those before me had.
However, I happily will add that there seems to be a silver lining underlying all of this: the well-respected profess(ionals|ors) that had been chosen to deliver the keynote or plenary lectures were spectacular. This means of course that here, in our time, there exist some engineers and scientists that are not only very capable of doing their own work, but also communicating that work to a broad audience. To me, that gives a glimmer of hope– we’re not all doomed to give muddled presentations on the work we slave over for the rest of our lives. Maybe someday when we’re >60 years old, we’ll have a chance to be effective communicators as well.
my attendance at the conference was preceded by a short trip home to visit friends and family, which was nice. My next trip back to CA won’t be until Christmas I presume, so that’s some time– and an entire new winter in Ithaca– away. 