iQua Research Group

Professor S. Keshav, one of the few academics who maintain blogs, has recently written an enlightening essay titled “Against travel.” By travel, he implies traveling to academic conferences.

I wholeheartedly agree that travel diminishes productivity. I felt that when I travel, I could not concentrate on one thing at a time. For example, rather than just tuning into the talks, I switch contexts more often, especially if the talks are not very engaging (a topic of its own). I was trying to learn from and enjoy the conference, at the same time of keeping an usual day-to-day workload — and this is hard to achieve. Most people around in conferences seem to be doing the same thing: juggling between emails and the conference itself. So much so that the provisioning of wireless Internet access at a technical session could be treated as a bug, rather than a feature. Keshav was also precise in pointing out that work does not go away after the trip, it just needs more time to catch up with.

On the other hand, it just turns out that — unlike teenagers — academics are not too keen on communicating over the Internet using more recent technologies than email messages. Very few frequently log into instant messaging systems (such as MSN, google talk, iChat AV, or Skype), or engage in a serious research discussion when they do. It is unlikely that a conference TPC meeting allows TPC members to tune in over Skype or iChat. Very few have research wikis or blogs. I cannot think of a web-based discussion forum to carry out academic discussions, or simply to publish CFPs. Well, it is probably because most are busy traveling — and working on the actual research.

If we progress beyond emails for research interactions, then at the very least TPC meetings can be held over the Internet, saving a trip or two every year! Is immature technology the root of the problem, when video conferencing has to go through insufficient bandwidth, NATs and firewalls? Or should we be more adventurous and use networks to do research in networking, distributed systems to do research in distributed systems, and multimedia to do research in multimedia?