I recently had a great time attending my first conference, Euro-Par 2024, as a computer science PhD student. I presented my paper How to Relax Instantly: Elastic Relaxation of Concurrent Data Structures in front of around 200 people, managed to win Best Paper, and got to know some great people. I could not have hoped for a better first conference. In this post, I'll share my experience, offer tips for future conference attendees, and reflect on what I wish I'd known beforehand.

The conference experience

If you've never head of academic conferences before, they are at their core a venue for people to share and present their research. The culture is very different in different research fields, but in computer science, conferences are the main place to publish your work and there exists many rankings comparing conference qualities. I went to the 30th edition of Euro-Par, which while not being the global flagship conference, is considered to be the main annual scientific event on parallel and distributed computing in Europe. It took place over five days, Monday to Friday, where the first two days contained workshops (like less reputable mini-conferences) and similar events, and the last three were the main conference with paper presentations, social events, keynotes, and so on.

This year, I presented my paper during the first non-keynote session of the conference on the Wednesday, as it had been nominated for best paper. It was very nice as no other talks ran in parallel and basically everyone from the conference was there. But I was also quite nervous, and spend Monday and Tuesday afternoons to prepare my talk. Although I missed some workshops, they were less interesting to me than the main conference, so I didn't mind much. For me, I think the best part of attending the workshops was getting a head start in networking/socializing, which is very nice. Giving your talk at the beginning of the conference is also fantastic as you become quite relaxed afterwards, being able to listen more to later talks and network without constantly thinking of your own presentation.

The conference had many parallel sessions and some good talks, but only one of the talks I listened to was close to papers I normally read, being about a wait-free mechanism for reference counting. The best part by far were the coffee breaks. To not just stand alone, I had to repeatedly approach new people. This led to me getting new friends, learning about other research fields (more than in most presentations), potential applications of my research, and potential future collaboration. As I got to present in front of everyone, and gave a good presentation, I had a much easier time networking. If you are ever going to a conference like this, I recommend to make the most out of these breaks. Furthermore, the conference contained things like keynotes which usually had a higher presentation quality than the other talks, and were nice to listen to.

Euro-Par also organized great social events. During the first night, we were invited to a nice rooftop bar and got served free tapas and drinks. For the second day we got a guided tour of the city (Madrid), and then went to a very nice gala dinner where they gave out prizes (such as my best paper), served us fantastic food and drinks, and we got a live flamenco show. I was incredibly impressed by the quality of the conference organization. As I made a lot of friends, we went out to a bar after the gala dinner, and ended the night with some churros around 3 in the morning.

So, in general, Euro-Par 2024 was great and I fully recommend going to similar conferences if you can. In the future I hope to go to more conferences, potentially ones closer to my field and maybe some with higher ranking.

Things I wished I had known

After this week, I now realize there are some things I would like to have known before going.

• Don't just present a conference paper. There were at least four ways to publish and share your work in Euro-Par this year:
  1. PhD Symposium. Here PhD students submit a couple of pages on their research project, and then presented it during the second workshop day. This is a good way to get a small publication, and also to disseminate your research. Although mainly aimed at younger PhDs, some of the presenters were in their last or second to last years. Here the best presentation even won an award. I would 100% do this if I were in the beginning of my PhD and attending a conference, and potentially even go to a conference just for this without a main paper during my first year of PhD.
  2. Workshop. The workshops are not as reputable as the real conference, but can be a good way to share earlier research and smaller projects as published papers. Many PhD students include a workshop paper in their PhD thesis.
  3. Poster. People could submit and present posters at the conference, which you could walk around and look at during some of the coffee breaks. This it also a great way to share your research, especially in an earlier iteration of it. Furthermore, there was also a best poster award.

• Going alone is great. I went alone from my school, and at first I was a bit bummed that my advisor/co-author did not join. However, I found that I was forced to step out of my comfort zone when going alone, which was probably good for my networking.

Giving a good presentation

Finally, presentations take up the majority of the time at the conference, and it is therefore important that they are of good quality. Sadly, I found that many of them were lacking. If you give a poor presentation, you will not be remembered. But if you give a good presentation, people will approach you afterwards, which could lead to interesting discussions or even future collaborations. This was definitely something I noticed after I gave my talk, making it a lot easier to find people to talk with. Furthermore, it is imperative to give a good presentation if you want to win a best paper award, as I am quite sure my presentation was the largest factor in me winning.

Here are therefore a few points of advice from me for giving a good presentation:

• Start non-technical, perhaps even mildly funny. This captures the attention of the audience easier, and can give them something to remember you for. For example, I started my talk with a selfie of me from the airport security queue, connecting it to my paper, and in the coming days I had some people remembering me as the airport guy.
• Keep the technical level low. Some people include heavy technical details such as proofs or a lot of mathematical text. This is the best way to lose 90% of your audience very quickly. People are from many different niches, and not expert in your area. Furthermore, they don't have the energy or motivation to understand such mathematical or complicated arguments from a single presentation.
• See the presentation as a preview. Your goal is to get them interested in reading your paper, or thinking about how to utilize your ideas in their research. Therefore, focus on conveying the larger ideas and intuition of your work, not the complex details.
• Utilize visuals to convey intuition. This is extra important if you want to show the idea of some algorithm or proof, which can otherwise become too complex. I heavily utilized figures and animations to show how my concurrent data structure operated, and many people came up to me afterwards, telling me how surprised they were that they understood it.
• Write a script, and practice. Even though you can give good presentations without a script, having prepared and practiced one will help you select more optimal phrases and waste less time searching for them. This makes it so you can fit more content into the presentation, as well as makes you more confident in the presentation, which can be seen by the audience.
• Don't bring notes. This ties in with the last point, but it is best to practice enough to not need notes. Otherwise you can get stuck in reading them.
• Look at the audience. This sounds easy, but is something most people fail at. Very common is for them too read text from the slides instead. Try to look at people in the audience, or if that is too intense, scan the audience, maybe looking at some empty chair for a bit.
• Enjoy sharing your research. Finally, people are almost forced to listen to your research. This is a great opportunity which you should try to enjoy. I kept telling myself I was not nervous, and would enjoy it, and after a while, that became how I felt. So even if you have to lie to yourself initially, it really helps if you enjoy the presentation.

On the other hand, there were also some things I missed, or did differently from other people:

• Include a conclusion slide. This is very useful for audience members who got lost (or lost focus) during the talk, as they get a final very quick recap of the talk. Also good to have a clear marker that you are rounding off.
• Title slide. Everyone else included the conference name and year. Furthermore, it can be a good idea to underline your name in the list of authors. Especially if you are not first author. Finally, everyone else started with this as their first slide (I had 1.5 minutes of airport talk before), which is usually good, but can be deviated from if you do it nicely.
• Plain bullet lists. I think it is a bit ugly to just have a slide with several bullets, as for contributions, and instead I did some boxes with text inside. However, everyone else used bullet lists, so it is probably very fine to use (but animations for the bullets is probably good).

Future Conferences

Hopefully I will be back to Euro-Par another year, but for now I have already submitted to another conference, with a higher ranking, as I would like to experience different ones. For example I am curious how the quality of the papers and presentation differs, if another conference is closer to my interests, and compare social events for different organizers. For example, I heard that conferences in the US can be very bare-bones if purely academical, and very fancy if it has strong ties to industry. Finally, I will likely try to present in a PhD symposium, potentially at a conference close to me without presenting a paper and applying for a travel grant.