Being adjusted to the time zone does not mean you'll get a good night's rest, especially before you have to give a big presentation. Things got started early again with another grand tasty breakfast, and then Frank and I headed out to the conference, it was invigorating to take the 15 minute hike across town. We met up with Irene and Ian in the registration line, and met some other grad students who also had research to present. It seemed like Monday was Wisconsin day, as Irene, Jude, Frank and I all had presentations on our research. I was very nervous, especially since I didn't know anyone there except through reading their paper, and it seemed all the big names were in attendance. I'd been to KDD and ICML before, but this was a much more intimate conference, with everyone on one track and you had their full attention. I made it through the presentation and the question section, and later David Page said it was a very good talk, so the practice and worrying helped after all.

As every day had about the same structure, I'll describe them all here in one broad overview. Before the first talks in the morning, there was a poster session with bagels and food, which I only discovered on day 3 (I kept on wondering where everyone went during the breaks until I followed Irene once, she always knows where to go). The morning was usually opened with an invited speaker talk, somehow relating ILP to another field, such as software engineering, systems biology or in Jude's case our information extraction task. They usually generated a fair bit of discussion from the crowd. Everyone was working on some interesting research, much more related to my interests than that of KDD or even ICML, I always feel like there's way too much specialization there, but with ILP the task is still broad enough that everyone can participate with new ideas. A few more morning talks, and then we would break for lunch. We headed over to another building for some good traditional Portugal dishes, either sausage and rice, or the special brine-soaked Cod which is their specialty, as well as some table wine to drink. Lunches were a good time to get to know the other grad students like Mark and Tolga to see how things were in their department, most of them did not have professors working on ILP, this was a side project they had published but not integral to their research. Lunch was followed by more presentations, each about 25 minutes with 5 minutes of questions, and they never felt rushed. One more break, where I could usually get away to email Laura in the local computer lab, and back to a few more talks before heading out for the evening activity. Although not all the talks were related, some were much more theoretical than I can understand, it was definitely a good learning experience and a conference I want to attend again.

Part of conferences I hadn't experienced before was the group sight-seeing opportunities, and the ILP community were like old friends on a family vacation. The first night we went on a boat tour up and down the river, which was very scenic and a different viewpoint on the local architecture than when on shore. It is amazing how close the buildings can be, three or four stories high. There were blue tiles everywhere, on large famous buildings and private residences, and I asked Irene to pick up some for us while she and Ian toured the rest of Europe on their honeymoon vacation, since they had more time to sightsee after the conference. Having friends with me was very cool, and meeting new friends made things fun too.

Our other joint sightseeing trip was first to a far away small village, travelled to by bus as usual, where we first toured the site of a monastary, and then wandered through the historic village. It was a little sureal seeing 50 computer scientists wandering around, we seemed a bit out of place making progress in herds along the ancient cobblestones. Eventually we found the bus again, which took us to the adjacent hilltop and a fabulous restaurant, where we had once again the famous Portugal breaded and salted cod. It was still tasty this time around, but I don't think I'll have cod again soon. It was hard to be outgoing for such a long time, always around people, it's not my natural personality, but sometimes it's worth it to be social.