• 15 April, 2011: Guayaquil, Ecuador
• 16-18 April: Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
• 19 April: Guayaquil, Ecuador
• 20-22 April: Lima, Peru
• 23-24 April: Puerto Maldonado, Peru
• 25-26 April: Cusco, Peru
• 27 April: Ollantaytambo, Peru
• 28-29 April: Aguas Calientes, Peru
• 30 April: Cusco, Peru
• 1-3 May: Santiago, Chile

Monday to Thursday of my trip were dominated by the Electronic Imaging 2011 conference, though I got to do other things as well on Thursday. This was a huge international conference, with something close to a thousand participants from all over the world, representing technology companies, research centres, and universities. As mentioned, I was there with three colleagues from Canon Information Systems Research Australia, and there were also other people from Canon USA as well as from Océ in France, which was recently acquired by Canon. And there were representatives from many of the big players in digital image technology, such as Sony, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Nikon, IBM, and so on, as well as Internet technology companies like Facebook and Google.

Electronic Imaging is actually an umbrella conference containing a dozen or so sub-conferences, all taking place simultaneously in the same venue. I was giving my paper in the Digital Photography stream, but there were also streams with names like: Stereoscopic Displays and Applications; Human Vision and Electronic Imaging; Computer Vision and Image Analysis of Art; Real-Time Image and Video Processing; Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision; and Multimedia on Mobile Devices. The various streams used one of the hotel’s many conference facility rooms for their oral paper presentations. Some of the rooms were small, holding only 30 or so people, others mid-sized, holding maybe 60 or 70 people. And then there was the main ballroom, which was decked out with a stage and seating for about 500 people by my estimate. All of these rooms were used simultaneously for various presentations, and you needed to juggle which of the dozen or so concurrent talks to you wanted to see most. I stayed with the Digital Photography stuff mostly, but this stream ended on the Tuesday, and another stream took over its meeting room on the last two days, so I had the chance to move around and sample some of the stuff being presented in the other streams.

By far the overwhelmingly biggest streams were those dedicated to 3D image technology. The 3D streams together monopolised the enormous ballroom for the entire four days of the conference. Whatever you want to say about the state of digital image technology today, it’s clear that by far most of the research interest and money is in 3D video, including TV, cinema, and 3D gaming technology. It became very obvious to me that the media technology companies like Sony, LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Philips, Toshiba, etc. are absolutely pouring money into research in this field.
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My work sent me on a trip to the Electronic Imaging 2011 conference, in San Francisco. This post will be a diary of the non-conference things I did on the trip, and I’ll follow up with a separate post about the conference itself, since some people may be interested in one or the other rather than both.

The conference ran from 24 to 27 January, and I attended with three colleagues from work: Chris (a woman I’d worked with on the project I was presenting a paper on), Andrew, and Geoff (a manager). To give us time to get over the jetlag, Chris, Andrew, and I flew in on Saturday, 22 January – Geoff had arrived a day earlier.

We emerged from San Francisco airport about 09:30 and the first point of business was to get to our hotel, the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport, which was where the conference was to be held. A free shuttle bus took us there, and I negotiated the tricky and unfamiliar business of offering the driver a tip after he helped us with our bags. I noticed another person on the shuttle doing it first, so I didn’t feel as silly as I normally do when practising this strange custom. The hotel checked us in right away, so we had the opportunity to have a quick shower in our rooms before heading out. We all subscribed to the idea that going to sleep upon arrival in the morning was the worst way to beat the jetlag, so planned to spend the day sightseeing and try to get to bed at a normal time in the evening.

We asked the concierge the best way to get into San Francisco from the hotel, and she said to catch the shuttle back to the airport and take the BART train from there. However, I’d researched and found that the Millbrae BART station was only about 2 or 3 kilometres away, so we elected to walk there instead. It’s interesting that the concierge never even mentioned the option of walking. The walk gave us a chance to get our bearings and clear our heads, before buying tickets and boarding the train for the city.

We got off at Powell St station, about as central in San Francisco as you can get. Emerging into the bustling city from the underground station was an exhilarating experience, and we soaked in the sights and sounds of the city. By now it was around 12:00 and we were all very hungry, since our last meal had been breakfast on the plane, at about 04:00 in the current time zone. We planned to walk past Union Square and find something perhaps in Chinatown, but even before reaching Union Square we spotted a restaurant labelled “King of Thai Noodle House”. We all looked at one another and said, “Yeah!” The food there was exceedingly good. I had a choo-chee salmon curry, in which the salmon fillet was deep-fried, then served over rice with a spicy red curry. Whether it was because of the hunger, or the fact that it was indeed extremely good, it felt like the best meal I’d eaten in ages.
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I walked home from work today. All the way. I normally catch a train, and it takes about half an hour. The train does take a rather roundabout route, though, so it’s not beyond reason to try walking it. I thought it would probably take a bit over an hour. It turned out to take a bit over 1.5 hours.

The route is shown on this Google Map.

I decided to try it today because it was a coolish afternoon, rather than a hot summer one, with a lot of cloud around, so I wouldn’t be walking all the way in the sun. Unfortunately it decided to rain on me. It was 26°C and basically 100% humidity. And the route is fairly hilly, so I was rather drenched in sweat by the time I got home. Still, it was a good exercise and I feel good for having done it!