This week (or the last, depending on if you start your week on Monday or Sunday, like we here in Finland used to) it was finally time for something months in the making – the 24th Symposium on Electromagnetic Phenomena in Nonlinear Circuits, or EPNC. Or, in plainspeak, a conference that my research group, electromechanics of Aalto University, had the honor and responsibility of organizing.
I’ve already written a short EPNC wrap-up post on our Facebook page, so I recommend you check that first – either on our page or simply the copy-pasted version below (with some links added for clarity).
#EPNC2016 is now over. We thank all of you who participated, and hope that the experience was as memorable and awesome to you as it was to us!
Below is some sort of a wrap-up of the event, for those who could not participate, or did but have mysteriously lost their memory.
—————————————————
The event began on Tuesday, with registration and then a welcome reception ceremony organized in the Helsinki city hall block, one of the oldest in the city. We were wished welcome by no one else than Pekka Sauri, the Deputy Mayor of Helsinki since 2003! After some nice food and wine, unofficial impromptu afterparties were organized in some nearby restaurants. Or so we have heard.
Wednesday marked the beginning of the more scientific part, with poster sessions and oral presentations alike. The usual goods. Hopefully not as usual was the conference dinner later in the evening, organized in the picturesque Lauttasaari island. Indeed, the weather was pretty much perfect, with the Nordic sun not setting until almost 11 pm. The food was “not bad” either. You might not know that the herbs served with the salmon actually grow freely in the Finnish nature – probably not something you get everyday.
Despite the odds, a few participants somehow managed to attend the Thursday morning session, starting at 9 am. We salute you. That kind of grit will get you far. After some sciencing, it was time for group visits to either the Suomenlinna Fortress Island, or the Seurasaari (also an island) Open Air Museum. Seurasaari had some interesting pieces of the Finnish history, and the weather was again nigh-perfect. Nature was quite nice as well. We can only hope the Suomenlinna trip was as awesome.
Finally, it was time to end the conference on Friday. After the final poster session and presentations, our Ugur Aydin was awarded for the best paper! Congrats, and let us know when you bring the celebratory cake! Those of you (and us) who did not get an award: don’t worry. The competition was fierce, and we still enjoyed your work.
—————————————————
Aalto Electromechanics thanks you all, and retires for some hopefully well-earned rest. It’s been a pleasure!
(Like our page.)
-from our page
There. That’s the official version, or what happened on the surface.
Okay, that sounded alarming. Or menacing. Whichever way you wish to put it.
Nothing very different happened under the surface either, apart from lots of work.
You see, apparently organizing large events is quite ponderous. EPNC was no exception.
And you could still realistically think they are not. After all, there are only a few fundamentally basic things to sort out.
Like booking the venue and catering, and somehow getting people to come there. That should kind of do it, right?
Well, yes and no.
I’m a huge fan of the Pareto principle – do 20 percent of something, to get 80 percent of the possible results. And that does apply to conferences as well, to a degree.
Getting scientists, or researchers, to come and present their work is obviously the core, the famous 80 percent, of any conference.
Heck, even catering isn’t needed. They are grown-ups after all, and should be able to feed themselves. Despite all the negative stereotypes about us sciency types.
So, we absolutely need a venue and some people. And organizing that is quite easy, barring any major disaster.
That should do in a pinch, right?
Not so fast.
I’ve also written about the Halo effect, the propensity of humans to assign positive qualities to persons based on their other, completely unrelated positive qualities. Like assuming a handsome person is also good at their work.
Unfortunately, that also goes in reverse.
Like, the lack of food would seriously piss off any EPNC goer – definitely including me. And a pissed-off conference goer is definitely not going to hold the scientific contents in any high regard.
Hence, food is also quite critical.
The million other details, taken alone, are probably not as significant per se.
But, getting any of them wrong makes a small negative dent in the attendees’ overall impression.
And frakking enough of them up can trigger a nasty snowball effect, causing people to assign disproportionate value to any other slight they notice. Which, mind you, they will now be much more likely to do.
Pretty much like the small things adding up I’ve already written about, only in the negative, exponential sense.
So, in this particular case, the Pareto principle may not apply as nicely as it very often does. All thanks to the quirks and pecularities of the human psyche.
Instead, we are left with its pessimistic reverse – the remaining 20 percent sucking out 80 percent of our time.
And that’s exactly what happened to us.
There are approximately 15 people in our group (I’m too lazy to count. The number of people in the group is an integer, luckily).
Sorting out that remainign 20 % required a significant portion of our combined output for weeks.
Stuff like printing out lunch coupons, certifications of participation, certifications of session chairing, posters, ads, banners, booking trips, organizing transportations, sorting AV equipment, making name tags, making the program itself, sorting out registration stuff, assembling conference bags, distributing conference program to 100 USB drives, …
Plus a thousand other subtasks I probably forgot.
Plus a thousand other subtasks required during the conference. I won’t list them here, but you are hopefully more than capable enough to use your imagination and/or reasoning to fill in the blanks.
But in the end, we did it.
Quite nicely, I’d like to think.
Well, some were probably less than happy with my somewhat strict-ish enforcement of time limits for the 1-minute introductory slides, but that’s life for you, and their opinion of it. Other than that, we didn’t really hear much complaining.
So, with the EPNC participants already having been thanked on the group’s Facebook page, I’d like to thank the us, the organizing group itself, for our awesome work. I know we’ve earned it.
-Antti
Check out EMDtool - Electric Motor Design toolbox for Matlab.
Need help with electric motor design or design software? Let's get in touch - satisfaction guaranteed!
