Monday 30 January, 2017. 19:14
The first day of the conference began with me waking up about 07:20 thanks to the light of the sunrise. I had a couple of the bagels I’d bought last night with cream cheese, and then did some stretching exercises to relieve the sore leg muscles from all the walking. I slept for most of the night, but woke up briefly a bit.
I headed downstairs to the conference in time for the opening talk at 08:50. Throughout the day I attended all the talks for the Digital Photography and Mobile Imaging (DPMI) conference stream, for which I am on the organising committee. There are parallel talks in other themed streams all going on at the same time, about seven or eight usually going on at any one time. The only exception was the conference-wide plenary talk held immediately after lunch, on large scale gigapixel imaging for microscopy. The other talks in DPMI were on a range of topics from camera arrays, depth imaging, image reconstruction, capture for immersive VR, and image quality assessment.
I bumped into various people I knew: Stuart and Quan from home, Nicolas who moved to Apple from CiSRA, as well as Jackson and Paul from Apple, Norman from Imatest, Margaret from Nvidia, and Francisco, formerly from Canon in San Jose, but now out of a job following the recent disbandment of his research team there. I got introduced to a number of other people who were hanging with them, but I don’t remember much who they were.
 Pear salad at Max’s |
For lunch, I decided to try walking to Burlingame, after Stuart said he’d tried yesterday and failed because of some street blockage due to roadwork. I thought I could probably walk around it, since I knew exactly where I needed to get to, but when I reached the blockage and tried to go around, I found it was much more extensive than I had realised, and indeed there was no way through, on either side of the road. So I turned back, thinking about where to go for lunch. Passing Max’s, a sort of diner restaurant, I spotted Paul and Margaret with a few other people, and called out to them. They suggested I join them for lunch, which I accepted, making us a party of seven.
Inside we were seated at a table, and I think Margaret and I were the only ones who didn’t work at Apple. The menu looked like enormous meals. Most of them got sandwiches or burgers, but I chose the pear salad, adding some pieces of sesame crusted tofu, thinking that would be a moderately healthy option. It may have been, but it was still huge, with walnuts and cranberries and blue cheese. It was nice though. At the end of the meal, Paul generously covered it as a business lunch expense.
 Nachos ingredients, conference reception |
After the last talk of the day, I returned briefly to my room to drop things off and then headed down to the conference reception. We had vouchers for a free drink, with which I got some red wine. There was food too: pita chips with various hummus dips and other dips, chicken wings with different choices of sauce, and build-your-own nachos, with tri-coloured corn chips, black beans, shredded chicken with capsicums, then jalapeños, sour cream, salsa, and melty cheese. I decided to fill up enough that I wouldn’t need anything else for dinner. Stuart and Quan were planning to go out for dinner at 19:00, but I declined, not wanting a late night or any more food.
And then after chatting with people for a while, I headed up to my room to relax for the evening.