My second conference trip: IJCAI 2023 (Macau) - Far more exciting than I think

This time I can sit down and write about my experience in a conference just after a few days, unlike my first conference trip to WSDM23. My feeling is faded, but still enough to genuinely tell the whole story.

Apply to be a volunteer

For this conference, we (my labmates and I) were encouraged by my supervisor to apply to this conference as an volunteer. This conference, as the name IJCAI suggested, is inherently close to our research than WSDM. Furthermore, as it would be held in Macau - very close to Hong Kong, and my university HKUST is one of the co-organizer, the driving force to volunteer registration is even larger. So we did it. Interestingly, I used ChatGPT to generate the templates for some necessary documents (e.g. Letter of Support from supervisors, Case of Support (i.e. Personal Statement), …) and asked my professor for approval of the use of this template, then shared with my labmates.

The application was a bit time consuming, though, and it made me mad sometimes as I was fighting to produce my first first-author paper. At the end, my application were approved. Nice! I would have a free conference trip in August!

Time flies, let’s go to Macau

A week before the conference, we started to receive some emails from IJCAI Volunteer Team about the work arrangement and hotel map. It’s hard to imagine what would we do, but it is always the case. In fact, I felt doubtful about the meaning of this trip, and mentally prepared for the case of a boring trip.

At the day we needed to come to the conference, some of us who lived on campus appointed to meet at 6:30am at Atrium. Then we took bus, MTR, and arrived the ferry port before the departure time 1 hour. Waiting other people to come, then we headed to custom, and went on board. Fortunately none of us has seasick, thus we comfortably travelled to Macau. As a Vietnamese citizen, my passport was so carefully checked by Macau’s customs that my labmates need to wait me 5 mins :/. So sad!

After getting out of the customs, we took a free bus to the Sheraton Hotel where the conference was held. Wow, the architecture of buildings in Macau is different from what in Hong Kong, as it’s more western. There are in fact more open space and less tree in Macau, making it more like a paradise for tourism rather than a place to reside. After 15 mins on the bus, we arrived the Sheraton Hotel. First thing I saw when I entered is, you can guest, casino! I could hear some sounds that signal the end of betting time, could see the live camera pointing to card dealer’s hands. We quickly checked in and went straight to the conference.

I feel like I am literally describing everything! It’s undesirable as it’s so time consuming. Thus, I will focus on what is outstanding in this trip

Volunteer Work

It’s not really hard to find the way to the conference. We were there when some people in our group would soon have a duty. We met our ‘boss’ Yoyo, and heard the duty description from her. We got volunteer kits which are normal kits for conference attendance plus two volunteer shirt. We needed to wear it when doing our duty to increase the recognizability.

My first duty were on the first day of the main conference (i.e the second day we were in Macau). Btw, in the first two days, I worked in the registration counter. U can guess that there was not much work for me to do, and it really was. Almost all people got their name bagdes already, just a few (less than 20 people in two days) came to my counter. Ah, one special guest of IJCAI that I took the name badge to her is Prof. Pascale. It’s like a fate :)) Even though we don’t collab anymore. In my last two days, I volunteered in a breakout room (in charge of technical issue, setup pptx, etc.). I didn’t learn much from these presentations though they seems the most related to my research area. It was like when I don’t know the problem, I cannot justify the contribution and the limitation of the work. Btw, there was an presentation from KU Leuven where my sister study PhD, and another presentation that the presenter forgot to .. turn on the mic :D But because the room is small, it’s completely fine. The funny thing is that she kept holding the mic, while it’s in fact useless :)))

For the rest of the time when I was on duty but had no duty to do, I talked with other people. Talked a lot!!! This time, I felt so much better than WSDM. I didn’t know why. Maybe this time I did not have to think much about my research as the last time. I talked with all people around me, and I was quite suprised that some of them don’t have good English skills. We talked about our university, research topics, and our home country. It’s a exciting occasion to learn new things from others. I also learned that it’s hard to find a person who works on the same research area NLP as me, not to mention specific research problem! Ah, I also met a (beautiful :v) Vietnamese sis studying PhD in the US. I found her info on the Internet, and kinda eager to see her f2f in the conference (as one of few Vietnamese people in the conference). Yet when I thought she would not come to the conference, she suddenly appeared and my ‘boss’ ask me to show her what she needed to do. What a time to meet my home country fellow :D

The most precious thing from these talks for me is to communicate with my labmates. I had two talks with two labmates, and I learned quite a lot of their current research, and ideas for future research. I think I will soon collaborate with Sehyun on the construction of a special knowledge graph.

Besides, there was a lot of fun when people there tried to ‘test’ my Chinese proficiency. Big sister (大姐) Jiawen got so interested in me, ‘talked about me in the whole day’ according to captain Weiqi. Sometimes she came to my seat and asked me some questions in Chinese, I could understand some but not all, as my Chinese proficiency isn’t that good yet. My labmate also joined the ‘test’ as a judge, calling me to their seats and together with Big sister and asking me questions in Chinese :)) A very very funny activity. I made a joke that this trip was in fact a urgent Chinese class for me :D

Attend conference talks

Even though the conference is AI-focused, not many presentations are related to my research. Thus, I just attend some, including those in the breakout room that I volunteered. As I said, I cannot justify the contribution and the limitation of the works, as I know nothing about the problems.

The most worth-attending sessions seem to be keynote talks, with one is from Prof. Pascale, one is about Creative Art human-AI collaboration. Prof. Pascale talked about Hallucination in LLMs and how to mitigate it. The talk received a lot of comments (but no real questions, as not many people work on that problem and know what to ask), some sound silly and subjective, some are philosophical but you know :D No one knows what will happen!

Btw, I hope that if I can travel to Singapore to attend EMNLP this year, there will be more interesting works related to my research, so that I can enjoy many presentations instead of casino volunteer work.

Life at Hotel and Conference

The feast, I’m sure that I was the most frequent eater of that restaurant during the time I stayed in the hotel.

All morning, plus one diversity lunch and a buffet with my lab and professor. To not get bored of the food there quickly, I segmented the area to take food from in each meal :)) In the first beakfast, I just ate bread, many kind of breads @@ Different types are slicly different from each other, e.g. the filling, the shape, or main foods vs sweets. Next meal is rice+meat, then congee, and finally noodle. There are a lot of vegetable and meat cooked in different ways, I just picked some in each day. But one thing unchanged is eating fresh vegie, lectuce, and fruit everyday. It keeps my body healthy!

One interesting phenomenon that I observed is that even in the restaurant of a 5-star hotel, people will soon get bored of the food there. For my labmates, half of them do not show up in breakfast there after two meals. It seems that they get bored of having to choose what to eat, rather than any problem with the food quality (btw food in Macau is salty @@). Back to the case of canteens in my university, a lot of my friends tell me that we don’t want to have meal there anymore (In fact many still eat there, because they have no other choice, I think). Transfering the reason of the case in Macau back here, I think people just get bored of having to choose, rather than food quality. I cook by myself every day, and I am 100% sure that what I make is not as delicious as food in canteen, but I NEVER get bored of food I made! So, the reason is just ‘having to choose’.

I also have chance to attend two buffets organized by the conference host. Food there is delicious too, and I was pushing me out of my comfort zone to talk with strangers. Ah, the second one is a pool party, where we can chill and have a more casual chat with others (it looks more or less like a dating event :D) I think that makes me more eager to talk with other people in this conference.

Casino

Here we come to the most exciting part in Macau. As said “Đến Macau ko đánh bạc đời ko nể” - “People who come to Macau but don’t gamble do not deserve others’ respect” :D, we headed to a casino in the first day in Macau. The feeling was so good :)) On the second day, we registered a VIP card that can be used in 5 casinos in that area :)) It’s free, yep. It’s heard that we will get free 100 hkd to play, but life is not that easy. We need to bet 500 hkd to redeem it! 500 hkd is a significant amout of money for us, thus no one tried :/

Btw, we found a game which is so so exciting to play together. DICES! Big or Small, and various betting options. As a guy majored in Math before, I continuously talked about the strategy to 99% earn money, as long as we have enough money to execute. Yet no one did so, while I didn’t want to spend money to try, just wanted to watch other people play. After crazy betting (on options with betting rate 1-get-6), we downed to 10 hkd and suddenly raised to 90 hkd (double the input as 50 hkd). Then at the end, we got 170 hkd, my goodness me! I found that this is the way that we should gamble. Purely funny and unexcepted. If we just play using probabilistic strategy, we will never experience real betting. Just play, do not think much.

Ah, on the last two nights in Macau, we played Poker together instead of going casino. Funny and real experience of gambling too! But Poker is more strategic, and player vs player instead of player vs host/machine. Beside, I learned a lesson in term of behavioral science. In the first night, there is no limit of the loss, thus we soon learned to play bravely - All in almost every game! Then in the second night, I proposed to set a loss limit that who surpasses it will be eliminated. In this night, people played very carefully, tended to fold their card very early in the game. I learned that when we have a threat of existence, we become less active to try and dare to do things. We rather act as the most safely as possible.

End of the trip

On the last day of this trip, I woke up early and ran around the estate of the hotel we stayed. I saw corners that I didn’t see when I just walk on the big hotel. I saw an open space in Macau, many other things which are more close to my life than what are in the hotel. That’s the unusual thing I wanted to do!

On that last day, I talked with my boss Yoyo for the first time, and ask her about her career on event management and her adaptation to the career. Before we left, luckily Big sister went back to the counter and took a photo with Weiqi and me. We left w/o any regret, as we enjoyed every moment in Macau and with my fellows.

All hamornize to create such a memorable trip for me!