This year two of our papers got accepted in BuildSys. BuildSys is a reputed ACM conference related to energy consumption of buildings. The conference dates were November 8-9, 2017 and the conference was at Delft, the Netherlands. I was supposed to present both of the papers at BuildSys. Since I am not a natural speaker and knowing the reputation of BuildSys, I started one month early to prepare slide decks. During this month, I gave several mocks in front of my colleagues and co-authors, and after several iterations, I was satisfied with the presentations and was ready to fly to attend BuildSys. Both of my talks were scheduled on the second day of the conference. I reached Delft on 7th evening, had dinner and slept early due to jet lag.

The conference was supposed to start at 8:30 AM. Accordingly, I did some time calculations, i.e., when should I leave from the hotel and also one of my colleagues had presented in Sensys (Co-located) a few days back, so she explained to me how much time it takes to reach the conference venue by walk. But on the first day, it was raining, and I somehow got confused with Google Maps. Nevertheless, I reached conference venue late by 15 minutes. There were various good presentations throughout the day and in the evening we had one-minute madness session to introduce our posters. I enjoyed the one-minute madness session and later we stood with our poster boards from 6 - 8 PM. So, the first day of the conference went well.

The next day we had our keynote speaker, Dr. Fahim Kawsar (Director, Nokia Bell Labs, UK) and I wanted to attend the talk fully. With first-day calculations, I left early, and I was able to attend his talk from beginning to end. Next to his talk, mine was scheduled. So, I went and connected the projector cable to my laptop. To my surprise, my laptop detected the projector, but the projector did not respond. The session chair patted me and said it would be okay, but it was not okay. I struggled around two minutes until one of my co-authors handed over his laptop. Fortunately, I had emailed my slide deck to him already for his feedback. I connected his laptop, and it worked smoothly. Since every presenter is given a specific time to present so now, I was short of time due to this connectivity issue. I believe I had an excellent presentation but I was not able to deliver well on the day, and the reasons were

  1. I wasted my confidence building time due to laptop connectivity issue which aggravated mental pressure
  2. During the presentation, session chair started to show his fingers (the time left), and this further built pressure. So, I rushed through my presentation.

I finished presentation by time and later audiences asked few questions which I answered, but I was not happy due to my lousy presentation. I felt bad and did not pay any attention to remaining talks till lunch session. After lunch, I build my mood again, since I had to present another paper. This time I reached early to presentation venue and checked my laptop connectivity issue. To my surprise, this time it got connected like boom and believe me within this time I did not tinker display settings. Even another presentee used my laptop to present his work. So the time came, and I went to present my second paper. This time everything worked smoothly, and I presented with full confidence, and I finished before time and answered a couple of questions happily.

Till now, this all is true story but now let us try to understand lessons from this story

  1. I have been using the same laptop for last three years, and I have presented several times at different places. I never faced any projector connectivity issue till BuildSys, and I was adamant that I will never face projector connectivity issue, but I faced. The lesson from here is, never trust a machine. It can break at any time, so it is better to be pessimistic in machines field.
  2. Make sure that you reach presentation venue early so as to check your projector connectivity. Check for two things 1) Connectivity 2) Slides: whether text, figures, and colors are projected properly.
  3. Always keep different formats ({.keynote or .ppt} & .pdf ) of slide decks with you. You never know which one will work.
  4. Carry your USB stick with you and keep your slide-deck at three places, i.e., laptop, USB and online (email or cloud)
  5. Carry a nice presentation clicker/pointer. I have one but I forgot to carry it on the day, and to my surprise, there was no clicker at BuildSys. Somehow I managed to present my first presentation, but for the second one, I borrowed clicker from one of the presentees.
  6. Please go one day early to your presentation city, if expenses allow. Know the place where you will be presenting early. This allows you to focus on your presentation entirely on the presentation day otherwise your mind switches between different issues.

Let’s now finish the remaining story. The conference finished around 6 PM on the second/last day, and I left for the hotel. My return flight was on next day from Amsterdam, so I vacated hotel next day morning and took a return flight from Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. Another bad thing that happened was that markets close early (around 5 PM) in Delft and our conference used to end till 6 or 8 PM, so I missed completely Dutch market liveness or Dutch culture. Next time, you get an opportunity to present at a different place, reach one day early and leave one day late to roam in the city, if budget allows.

Here are some of my pictures at Delft with one of my friends, Sangeeth. Sangeeth graduated from IIIT Delhi and is now doing PhD at TU Eindhoven. Fortunately, he was in the city on the same day, and we met.

Tu Delft Haroon Tu Delft Haroon