17 September 2008

ISIC Conference Day 2

Day 2 is the busiest day of the conference, since there are no preliminaries and everything kicks off at 9.00 a.m., on a perishingly cold morning - for some reason, Winter has hit Lithuania early and the temperature is at least 10 degrees below normal for the time of year. However, on the principle that more bodies create more heat, this does mean the people are attending the conference instead of bunking off for a look round the town :-)

Fifteen papers were delivered today, starting with Pertti Vakkari's keynote address, which looked at the development of ISIC between 1996, when he founded the conference, and today. Not all of his conclusions were optimistic and he raised some crucial issues for the development of the research area.

Following the keynote, we had papers on a wide variety of subjects, from the role of information in development in South Africa, to the behaviour of Australian online investors and South African consulting engineers, to the users of public business information services in Japan and changes in computer scientists' behaviour over twenty years.

At 17.20 most of the participants went off on a tour of the city - I imagine that they were pretty chilly by the time they finished, but at least they may have seen the hot-air balloons floating over. What they were doing up on a day like this, heaven only knows!

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