I just finished up attending the 2007 Statistical Signal Processing Workshop in Madison. Normally I would have blogged about all the talks I saw, but (a) the only “talks” were tutorials and plenaries, and (b) I’m a little burned out to write much. Despite the fact that I applied to grad schools for signal processing and took the DSP prelim exam at Berkeley, I’m not really much of a signal processing guy these days. All of the submitted papers were given as posters, and despite being organized into “sessions,” all the posters were in the same room, so there were about 30-40 talks going on at the same time in parallel for 2 hours. I was a bit dubious at first, since my experience with poster presentations is that they have a large effort-to-value ratio, but this format worked for me. I was unfamiliar with about 80% of the problems that people were trying to solve, so going to talks would have made me confused. Instead, I could at least talk to someone and get the point of what they were trying to do, if not the scale of their contribution.

The one downside to the conference for me was that several of the posters that I wanted to see were in the same session as me, so I ended up missing them! Luckily I was next to “Distributed Average Consensus using Probabilistic Quantization,” which is right up my alley (from my work on gossip algorithms), but I could only listen in every once in a while. If only we could encode our talks using an erasure code — then if I listen to 7 minutes our of 10 I could interpolate the other 3…