So, the FRUCT25 conference is done, and with that, presumably my last appearance at an international conference during my MSCA fellowship. My itinerary for the remaining time is pretty straightforward: a month in Dublin, then to Finland again to celebrate Christmas and New Year, then back to Dublin for another month and then it’s a wrap. No more conference papers, time to turn my attention to writing journal articles and final reports.
Considering how many times I’ve landed at Helsinki airport in the recent past, it was a little bit strange to realise that it had been over a year since I last visited the actual city. Despite this being November, hardly a time when anywhere in Finland is at its best, it felt nice to be walking the streets of my country’s capital again. I’ve never lived there, but I’ve spent plenty of time there and it feels very familiar to me, almost like a second home – or perhaps a third one, now that Dublin has been my second home in a very real sense for the past couple of years.
The main reason why I like to visit Helsinki regularly is that quite a few of my friends have ended up living there over the years, and I made sure to reserve plenty of time for seeing them. Normally on a conference trip I would do some touristy things, but in this particular case I felt little need to go sightseeing, although I did scout out some bars and restaurants in advance so I could go check out some interesting ones that I hadn’t tried before. On the flip side of having such easy access to my usual social circles, I also didn’t feel much of an urge to socialise with my fellow conference delegates, although I did have a pleasant chat with a few of them over some wine and snacks at the combined social event and poster/demo session.
The conference itself was a rather low-key and low-budget affair in comparison with the lavish IEEE CEC, but the scientific programme was solid enough, the proceedings will be available on IEEE Xplore and the event is recognised by various national rating systems as a perfectly respectable one. The full title of the conference is “Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT”, and it doesn’t really have an easy-to-define theme apart from innovation involving information and communication technologies. FRUCT itself stands for “Finnish-Russian University Cooperation in Telecommunications”, and there is a certain degree of geographical theming in the sense that the events normally alternate between Finnish and Russian locations and most of the participants tend to come from these two countries. However, at least in Helsinki there were delegates also from various other parts of Europe and Asia; according to the official facts and figures, the total number of countries represented by the authors of accepted papers between them was 28.
Shortly before travelling to Finland I sent out an ad looking for volunteers to join the trial I’m running to test the results of the work I’ve done in Dublin. This resulted in a rather busy period as quite a few people were eager to sign up and I needed to get everyone to give their informed consent and start collecting data before I went away. Now that I’m back I find myself in a bit of a lull, since the data collection phase doesn’t require much active involvement from me. This gives me time to do things that are not so central to the success of my project, such as writing this blog and reviewing papers for a 2020 conference I’m in the programme committee of. I also reprised my guest lecturer role from last year, since I was invited to do so by a colleague and I only needed to make some very slight revisions to the slides I used in my previous lecture.
This relatively quiet period won’t last forever, of course. When the data from the trial starts to roll in I’m surely going to have my hands full, so I have no doubt that when I start my end-of-year break, I will do so with a feeling that I really deserve it. Meanwhile, things are already getting busy with my main extracurricular activity, the DCU Campus Choir. Our Christmas concert is approaching fast, with only three regular rehearsals left before it, so we have some extra ones booked and there’s also a fair amount of homework to do. The concert will be in All Hallows Chapel on Monday the 9th of December starting at 19:30, with free admissiontickets just €5 and followed by a mulled wine and mince pie reception. Do join us if you’re in Dublin!
You Know Nothing, Socrates 