I missed the business meeting to have dinner with a non-SODA-attending friend and so missed the voting over the location of SODA 2012 which was apparently a close tie.
I’m a little dismayed at SODA being outside of North America. As a graduate student I would have probably been excited in my responsibility-free state. But now I’m thinking “How much is this going to cost? How can I afford to miss what will probably end up being a full week of teaching? I’m going to go all that way to just go to the conference and not be able to travel? How are our grossly underfunded faculty and grad students going to afford to go? Would I justify going if I don’t have a paper?”
SODA is my favourite conference. And there’s no other conference like it in North America. Going without it for a year would result in some withdrawal.
Does anyone have a quote on how much an airline ticket from say NY or SF to Tokyo costs in January? I’m guessing > $1000.
I’ll take a wild guess that the parts of the world with the most SODA attendees, in descending order, are Eastern North America, Western North America, Europe, Asia, Israel, and other. I would guess that holding SODA in Western North America vs. Europe would yield similar aggregate time in airplanes, with Western US difficult for people from Europe, Israel, and Asia, whereas Europe is difficult for people from Western US and Asia. I therefore don’t see a problem with holding SODA in Europe. On the other hand Asia is a 10+ hour flight from the vast majority of attendees, so holding SODA in Asia seems silly.
Especially since there is going to be ICS 2011 in Beijing. On the other hand, if one can get a paper into ICS 2011, then one get a free airplane ticket to asia and then soda trip would be less expensive, assuming the time lag between the conferences is not too long …
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