ISER and Québec City, Pt. I

For the first of my two trips back to North America (sheesh), I went to Québec City for ISER, the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics. ISER is an okay conference, not a super-top-tier one, but I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the papers overall.

I've also heard people refer to ISER as the "robotics travel club". I wondered if people were just being snide, for some reason?  Well, here's the list of places ISER has been/will be held. Essaouira; Québec City; New Delhi; Athens; Rio de Janeiro; Singapore; Sant'Angelo d'Ischia, Italy; Waikiki; Sydney, Australia; Barcelona; Stanford; Kyoto; Toulouse; Montréal.
 
So... no! Clearly the people in charge of ISER are using it partly to fulfill their travel itches – or, more charitably, they're trying to attract good people by making the conference appealing. Since there were three <!> banquet/cruise/organized event type things (instead of one), and since there was no lower-cost student registration (which is unusual), I'm leaning towards the former.

So it shouldn't have surprised me that Québec City is amazing.

Left: the conference venue.  O.o  Right: the building across the street that my hotel (and the American consulate) were in.

The castle-lookin' thing is the conference venue. That's the Château Frontenac. The castle was built in the 1890s, specifically to be a luxury hotel. (I looked it up after a colleague looked up at it and said, "Wait, did they add all those windows when it was turned into a hotel?" Well, no, actually. Good catch.) I stayed in a nearby boutique hotel, which was half the price and twice the character – internally, the castle rooms are boringly hotel-ish.

People differ on whether the jet-lag is worse going from the U.S. to Europe, or vice versa. I've mostly heard people say it's worse going Europe-wards. Well, in keeping with my usual level of inverted sleep schedule, it was the opposite for me. It must have been Wednesday or Thursday before I really woke up.

A panorama of more-or-less what I saw when I left my hotel, including a better view of the Château. Also mountains, blue sky, water, etc., etc. Another good word for Québec City: expensive

I actually presented at this conference. It went exceedingly well; it was a little too early for me to be as nervous as usual (I want to say 11am? I don't remember now). One of the conference organizers sent mail to my adviser commenting that I had given a good talk, which is always super helpful.

(I'm going to start trying to write useful descriptions of my papers. My ISER paper is here (sorry, super bare-bones, I'll clean it up after sleep). Comments welcome!)

From here I pretty much only have pictures, which I'll make Pt. II, because boy, these keep getting long.