Greetings All, I've returned from the AAAI and CEAS conferences (www.aaai.org and www.ceas.cc) in San Jose and Mountain View, and will start my usual follow-ups this weekend and early next week. Both were very useful events, and there is a lot to follow up about.
We distributed some CDs with SenseClusters and WordNet::Similarity at both events, and much to my surprise, nearly all are gone! This surprises me as we started with 250! I kept 5 for us here at UMD, and there were only a handful of others that might have been left behind in San Jose at the convention center. So we distributed approximately 180 copies at AAAI, and 50 more at CEAS. These were nice looking CDs (with profesionally printed images on the CDs) so I am sure some folks picked them up without any idea of what they were, or expecting the usual Windows style demo. But, others seemed to have genuine interest, so hopefully we'll add a few new users as a result. I'm quite happy with how this went, so I am now planning to have a CD each summer available for conference distributions, with our best work on display (and tied into a paper,demo, or poster presentation). One might wonder "why distribute a CD when everything can be downloaded freely?". Two reasons I think - First, the CDs contain all of the code needed to run each system, and sometimes downloading all of those can be a bit tedious, especially when running over a telephone network connection (something I do fairly regularly). Second, I think having a physical artifact (the CD) rather than simply a URL serves as a concrete reminder for the user (to try and install, etc). OK, more on these conferences soon! Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70 http://us.click.yahoo.com/Z1wmxD/DREIAA/yQLSAA/x3XolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nlpatumd/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
