IUMRS-ICEM 2008 Wrap-up

The 2008 IUMRS-ICEM conference came to a close today.  Between attending sessions and working on articles for the Meeting Scene, the past few days have been very busy and I have not had much time to update the blog.  However, a lot of things have been going on.  Wednesday night was the conference banquet.  We took a boat from Darling Habour for a short cruise around the harbour before going to Luna Park, an old-time amusement park on the other side of the harbor, for the dinner (check out the picture of myself with Gopal Rao and Mike Driver, whom I had the pleasure of working with on the Meeting Scene).  The food at the dinner was excellent, and I got to eat some emu and kangaroo for the first time.

Thursday, I spent most of my day at the Energy Forum.  I am very interested in the current energy crisis and potential solutions, so it was very interesting to hear the opinions of some leading scientists in the field.

Today, I spent some time at the Industry Forum hearing about some case studies from Australian startup companies.  To me, it seems like they all have some really exciting technologies, yet it seems that growing a successful startup company can be very challenging with no real guarantees of success.  It will be interesting to see where these companies and technologies are in another 10 years or so.