As one of the KTH entourage to ITS -13, I have arrived at an unusually stormy Florence this Sunday. As a first timer to a conference that is not 100% technical oriented, I had a few impressions that I would like to share.
My presentation was moved from second day to one of the first sessions, thus I did not have much idea (except what Jan had told us before the conference) as what is the style of the presentation in this conference. My presentation was about ‘opportunity and challenges for a converged platform for audio-visual and mobile data services in UHF broadcasting band’. And it was built upon previous technical findings and included further discussion from business and regulation perspective s on the broadcast-broadband convergence issue.
Without realizing that not every audience in the room knows what is DTT or SFN, I pushed on with my presentation. But luckily it still caught the interest of a few audiences and two of them have asked me some quite relevant questions on the future of UHF broadcasting band. However, it is not until I had a close discussion with them that I realized one of them is a PhD in economy and finance and another is a senior economist. Maybe I should have started my presentation with a disclaimer about my engineering background and even more elaborated background story, so the audience knows what to expect.
Perhaps ITS is not the ideal place to look for feedbacks on your technical problems, but it is definitely a good opportunity to look at what are the ‘real’ people interested in about telecommunication. The diversified and usually high level discussions could give you some useful inspirations about the general research direction. And having a discussion with someone who looked at the same issue from a completely different perspective is a very enlightening experience. Besides, there are always some stimulating ideas that will grab your attention, even though you may argue if they are 100% valid from scientific perspective. To name a few: creating fake facebook account to test how deep the recruiting company would dig into your privacy, or analyzing the social impact of mobile infrastructure based on restaurant reviews and satellite elevation maps.
You should be able to find all these papers on ITS website very soon, free to download.
