14 Reasons Not to Attend UMAP 2009

  1. A lot of the ideas that will be presented at the conference can already be found on the conference website, including MP3 files of all the abstracts; so you can learn quite a bit about the field without even leaving your office.
  2. Attending keynote addresses by world-leading researchers may stimulate your thinking so much that you forget to keep track of your sinking stock prices.
  3. Hearing dozens of stringently selected presentations on all aspects of the topic may make you realize how many application areas, modeling techniques, and advances in interaction design you have been blissfully unaware of (good thing no-one else needs to notice!).
  4. Because of the mainly single-track format, everyone will be discussing the same talks, so you won’t be able to say “I missed that one because I was in another talk”.
  5. While leaving a poster/demo session, you will probably walk by at least one poster that you would have loved to discuss with its presenter - if you hadn’t gotten so engrossed in discussions with other presenters.
  6. Most of the students who present their ongoing research in the Doctoral Consortium will not be well-known researchers until several years from now.
  7. Attending the Industry Session and the Industry Panel may make you wonder why your research hasn’t yet made you a darling of the venture capitalists.
  8. If you attend one of the workshops, you may find that it really does require a good deal of “work”, to help push forward the state of the art in this field.
  9. Signing up for the tutorial may make you feel like a high-school student, until the tutorial actually begins.
  10. Even the most brilliant comments that you make during the discussion sessions will probably not be uploaded to YouTube and viewed 25 million times within a single week.
  11. During your free time, you will be forced to choose between hiking in the Alps and strolling among the buildings that hosted the 16th-century Council of Trent.
  12. The dishes “Strangolapreti al burro fuso” and “Semifreddo di castagne con crema di pere” are not part of your “Get Slim for the Summer” diet.
  13. If you stay out late with friends on the Piazza del Duomo, the next morning you may need three mocaccini and a brioche to get alert in time for the keynote address.
  14. If you skip the whole thing and stay at home, you can spend 3–5 additional days doing the same things that you do during most of the rest of the year.