Gent, Belgium
The machine learning conference in Gent, Belgium went well. The speaker before me finished 5 minutes early and I was the last talk of the day... so I made the most of it and talked for 35 minutes followed by 10 minutes of question time. As my presentation topic was seriously radical and ambitious, I was proposing a universal mathematical definition of intelligence, I thought there might be some really tough questions during question time. It turned out that I could easily answer the questions, and indeed one question was perfect because what he asked about was what I presented a paper on the week before at the Gödel symposium in Vienna. I couldn't have planned it better! My supervisor thought it was a "great presentation" and the next day I had people commenting on how confident and passionate I was while talking about my research.
For those who are interested:
talk slides
poster
paper
As for Gent... well it was rather pretty actually with lots of old buildings, bridges and canals. Some of the views could have been oil paintings:
After the social dinner I headed out to a salsa bar with some of the other students. On the way I found this mysterious looking building all beautifully lit up:
