March Meeting 2017

Back when I regularly updated this blog, I’d post about the APS March Meeting. I’ve been going to the March Meeting since 2003, only having skipped 2014. Every year since 2006, I’ve scraped parts of the program with some evolving Tcl scripts in order to re-format them in ways that make sense to me and let me sort through the immense schedule and figure out which talks I want to see. This year I could 734 sessions and 1030 Invited speakers. I estimate there are 8300 contributed talks and 1175 posters.

It’s too much to read through all the titles (let alone abstracts) of all the contributed talks, so the first step is to nicely format the session titles. I put them on one page, use typography to distinguish Focus Sessions and Invited Sessions, and indicate the total number of invited talks.

It is feasible to skim through all the invited talks, if presented correctly. I group them by time block and session, and include the author name and talk title. This way, I can look for topics that look interesting and speakers I know to be good. And I do look through the whole thing. The APS does have a list of invited speakers, but it’s listed alphabetically by author, which might inadvertently lead one to pick conflicting talks to attend, and also makes it hard to search for interesting topics.

Finally, I make a session/block grid, to show the overall structure of the meeting.

Here’s what I have for the 2017 March Meeting:

Epitome_Mar17

Invited_Mar17

Grid_Mar17