Slovakia for the SEFI/IGIP Conference

Our schools paid us to go to Europe for a week.  Believe it or not, this was pretty cool.  Of course, it wasn't quite that simple.  The schools only pay for travel to conferences if you're presenting a published paper there, so we had to come up with something the conference organizers would accept as science (or at least, about science) and make it through the selection and review process, and fill out some really exciting paperwork (in Japanese) to make it happen.  Incidentally, SEFI and IGIP are the West European and East European engineering education research groups, respectively.  They meet together every other year and have individual conferences on the off-years.

Ana wrote a paper titled "Collaborative Learning of Engineering and English: A New Approach", which talks about her school's new cross-cultural program where the English teachers and the English-speaking engineering teachers work together to get the students to use relevant technical foreign-language vocabulary and understand how to interact in engineering groups with Westerners.  A school up in Hokkaido with a program called EEE, or English Engineering Education, has a much higher bar for the language portion of the program where instead of trying to teach technical vocabulary, they simply mandate that students use English for their entire degree program.  However, writing about that program probably wouldn't have gotten us a trip to Europe, so CLEE it was.

I co-wrote a paper called "Understanding Student Performance Diversity Using Clustering Techniques" which is about gathering ~50,000 data points relating to how students perceive and perform in one of the mandatory-for-all-students classes my department is responsible for, and shoving those data points into algorithms that tell you which ones are more like each other and less like the others, which allows us to see the student body as a number of cohorts with meaningfully different characteristics rather than a homogeneous blob.  All that sounds cool, and it sort of is, but without a decade-long program to expand and make use of the technique for feedback and improvement it will ultimately be not very useful, except for getting me a trip to Europe to talk about it.  The techniques used to cluster and study the data were pretty interesting and could be very useful in future endeavors as well.

We had the papers submitted and accepted by the beginning of the summer and the travel and other arrangements pretty much sorted out before we left on our month-long trip to the US in August, which was really good because we only had 17 days between getting back from that trip and leaving for this one.  We were definitely feeling a little traveled-out as we re-packed our bags and caught the bus back to the airport, but we found that once we were in it, the novelty of where we were and what we were doing got us back into the world-traveling spirit.

Due to the time of our flight out of Tokyo, we had to spend the night before at a hotel outside the airport, which wasn't a particularly interesting experience except that they had a surprisingly good buffet restaurant featuring both Japanese and Western cuisine.  The second interesting thing about that night at the hotel was that we overslept by about two hours (we were using an alarm set to go off only on weekdays, and it was Saturday) and thus found our schedule for making the flight somewhat compressed. We needed to be packed and in the lobby about ten minutes after we woke up in order to make the next shuttle bus to the airport.  We left little burning streaks behind the wheels of our bags in the hallways of the hotel and made that bus.

We found the Austrian Airlines counters, which had nobody in front of them because everybody else for all of their flights that morning had already checked in.  The attendant put "Priority" tags on our bags and told us to be at the gate in 15 minutes, which is not a reasonable timeframe for clearing both security and immigration.  We knew that that was the time that boarding would begin, and that boarding for a 777 takes at least 20 minutes to half an hour, so we weren't completely screwed.  Security only took ten minutes, and immigration maybe fifteen, so with some high-quality scampering between where we were and each place we needed to be next, we made it to the gate in time to see the tail-end of the boarding queue entering the plane and to join them.  Very few people came after us, but we made it onto the plane, so the oversleeping cost us nothing but breakfast and a couple very stressful hours.  One can enter Narita Airport and be boarding a plane 45 minutes later, but I cannot recommend counting on doing so.

The flight was direct from Tokyo to Vienna, where the conference organizers would be providing a bus to take us to the actual conference venue.  The flight was between 12 and 13 hours long, and the seats were tiny - easily the least legroom I've had on an international flight.  Thankfully, we took a different plane on the return trip with much more legroom and upgraded TV/movie offerings.  Small legroom aside, the food and service were pretty good and we slept for about half the flight so I can't complain too much.

We had to wait around in the airport for a couple of hours before our bus would be there, and ended up meeting two other KIT professors during that time, one (my co-author) who'd actually been on the same flight as us.  That gave us someone to talk to as we waited for and then took the bus.  The bus didn't spend much time in Austria before crossing the border into Slovakia and driving through the capital, Bratislava, then past endless fields of wind turbines before finally arriving at our destination, Trnava.  Trnava is not a very big city (population less than 70,000 people according to Wikipedia) and all the hotels near the conference site were booked before we got around to reserving a room, except for one hotel - the brand new Holiday Inn Trnava, which, based upon what we heard and saw from other people, was among the nicest hotels in the city.  Definitely among the nicer ones I've stayed at, with a few features I've not encountered elsewhere.  We got dinner at the bar in the hotel, which wasn't cheap, but was surprisingly good, and finally ended the day that had started something like 20 hours earlier in Narita.

Hilarious Holiday Inn Trnava room party lights

We arrived on a Saturday, and nothing conference-related began until Sunday afternoon, so Sunday morning we ate breakfast at the Holiday Inn (so many, many things that cannot be obtained in Japan, like real cheese, cured meats, multiple styles of granola and nuts and fruit; everything was very high-quality and it was wonderful) and had some time to walk around Trnava.  Initial impressions were not tremendously favorable.  The city features quite a lot of graffiti, which is unfortunate because many of the buildings under the graffiti are hundreds of years old.  There were some pretty nice things, like the old defensive wall, which predated weaponized gunpowder, and a couple of pretty serious churches, but nothing really spectacular.  Also, due to it being Sunday, almost everything was closed and the streets were mostly empty, which was a little creepy.  The town seemed much nicer when the shops were open and people were walking around, though it would be hard to recommend the place as a tourist destination.  For someplace we got to visit on a paid trip, it was great.  We got lunch at a restaurant on the side of a big plaza and paid about $5 for lunch for two with wine.  The food was good but the wine fully justified the 75-cents-per-glass price.  Note that we've finally come to a part where we have some pictures.

 Graffiti and Soviet-era buildings were in evidence, though the old section of the city seemed lighter in both

 Defensive wall from way back, goes around some of the edges of the old part of the city

 There seemed to be a major church on every street corner

 The streets were very empty in some places on Sunday

 View from the street outside the restaurant, shown on the right

Potato battered fried chicken with cheese and crappy wine

In the afternoon, registration for the conference opened and we confronted a difficulty - nowhere on the website or in the promotional materials was the exact location of the conference explicitly shown on a map, and the location shown on Google Maps when we put in the address of the school that we had was clearly erroneous, because it showed it in the parking lot across the street from the hotel.  There was a school-like building in the vicinity, but it appeared to be under renovation and had no open entrances and no signs.  We did a couple of loops around the neighborhood of gradually widening diameter, looking for signs saying "This Way" or other evidence of our target.  We eventually picked up the trail when we witnessed passers-by carrying bags with the conference logo carrying conference materials walking through one of the big plazas.  We observed the flow of pedestrian traffic and determined that the people carrying bags issued mostly from one particular street, and began following the bags upstream until we successfully located the conference location.  We registered without difficulty, claimed logo'd bags of our own, and then went back to the hotel and grabbed a much-needed nap prior to the evening reception.  We later asked people how they'd found the conference location and they either reported that they'd asked their hotels or that they'd followed someone who already knew.  Cheaters...though I think it is pretty lousy planning not to have put a map on the conference website or something.  The reception was a pretty casual affair, though well-stocked with appetizers and other snacks, something that could be said about the event as a whole - they never missed a chance to feed the attendees heartily, and in most cases, pretty well.  We enjoyed somewhat higher quality local wines (freely available) and met a bunch of people from a bunch of countries, including some faculty members from various universities where we may seek PhD's in the future, which was nice.  We were still beat from the jet lag and called it a night when the party ended.

 A view from on the trail of the actual conference location - take a right before the yellow building there

This building was much harder to find than it should have been (picture borrowed from conference website)

Monday and Tuesday were similar.  In the morning, we bought breakfast from a local bakery (paying ~$1 for several excellent rolls which we were initially surprised to find out were covered in garlic, not sugar, upon tasting) then headed to the school where everybody gathered in the big auditorium for several keynote speakers (varying in quality between mediocre and pretty good) followed by splitting up into five or six different rooms based around different areas of research for the presentations of the individual papers.  They fed us lunch (their lunchroom was totally crushed by the number of participants, was not a good idea to go during the rush) which generally had some good and some bad elements  - probably would have opted to go to a restaurant if the food at the conference hadn't already been paid for.  In the afternoon we returned to the five or six rooms for more presentations and discussions.

The big auditorium filled with captivated listeners (borrowed from conference website)

On the whole, the academic level of the materials being presented was lower than I expected, with a fair bit of fluff and "In our country, this is the state of higher education" which provided a lot of nice background material on global educational initiatives but not a lot of stuff that anyone had actually taken to a classroom, implemented, and tested against the alternatives.  The conference theme was "Diversity unifies - Diversity in Engineering Education" so it's not that surprising that programs like that (Ana's paper is an example of the species) were the norm instead of papers based on hard data.  At any rate, we learned a few things, met some people, and attended our first international conference, and we were paid to be there, so we surely cannot complain too much.  In other news, students in Finland don't pay for college and face no pressure to take a full course load, resulting in an average length for a bachelor's degree of seven years.  Who knew?  

On Monday night they had another reception and on Tuesday night they had a big formal gala and everybody got dressed up.  By that time we knew several people at the conference pretty well so we had a good table to sit at with enough English to keep the conversation lively.  Wednesday morning was like Monday and Tuesday morning, but with fewer people in attendance - we might have skipped it and slept in if one of our new acquaintances hadn't successfully lobbied us to attend his presentation (on the new Master's program in Humanitarian Engineering being worked on with Australian Engineers Without Borders, which incidentally looked very practical) before heading back to Vienna on the afternoon bus.

Incidentally, the big party was definitely at the Holiday Inn (borrowed from conference website)

 We got some pictures of the wind turbine fields on the way back

You can see the pictures from this trip here.

Conference website is http://www.igip-sefi2010.com/ but I'm putting this here to give credit for their images, not because I recommend going to the website, though you could if you wanted to...