Hello folks,
another update from PhD studies. This time, I would like to share how it is to go on a conference. I attended IECON 2022 “48th Annual Conference of the Industrial Electronics Society IECON 2022 Conference” in Brussels in Belgium, where I presented my paper “Fault Detection in Variable Phase-Pole Machines based on Harmonic Plane Decomposition”.
The conference took one week from Monday morning to Thursday evening. So, on Sunday I took a plane to Brussels. Well, unluckily for me it didn’t go according to plan and I arrived at midnight at my hotel. Grab some food and going to bed, since on the next day, the registration and tutorials are at 8 in the morning.
At the registration, I receive a batch (important!), which will be my entrance to the building and also my ticket to receiving food in the next days. I also get a leaflet with the program as well as access to WiFi. With the organizational stuff done, I head further to the tutorial sessions.
In the morning, I decide to attend a tutorial by the Aalborg University about Wide-Band-Gap devices in wind power applications. Especially interesting is the presentation of their newly built medium power lab.
In the afternoon, I decide to go in a completely different direction and attend a tutorial by several universities from Japan about artificial intelligence in motion control. Oddly enough, the professor starts talking about Japanese pancakes. However, this is their example of a robot applying different ways to learn how to prepare such a pancake without human guidance.
The second day starts with a keynote speech by Katherine Jensen from the European commission with their approach to evaluate developments in research for decision makers in the European Union, a nice insight into how our work may end up influencing the policy.
But now, finally the sessions start. The day is divided into a morning, an early afternoon and a late afternoon session with several parallel sessions. The most important is to keep track of the time table and best to prepare the day with marking the presentations one would like to listen to. Once there it is running from one room to the next one. Mostly I am attending the machines and drives and the electric transportation sessions.
After two days of running around, speaking to people in the coffee brakes and during lunch, I have the chance to present my own work to the audience. Early in the morning, some people are there. I have 15 minutes time to talk about the content of the conference paper and some minutes to answer questions. As always it is very difficult to present a research content in such a short time, but I think people got the idea and some more know about the research focus here at KTH. If you are interested, here is the conference article.
After the presentation I get into a discussion with some interested PhD students from other universities over multiphase machines in general. In the following days, the conference organizes a gala dinner and on the last day the closing event is at an international food court. Over a drink we discuss the conditions and experiences of being a PhD student in different countries. I meet some of my peers I met earlier that year on a summer school in Italy. One cannot underestimate the value of such exchanges.
I decided to stay on day more to explore the city of Brussels and visit some museums, after a week listening to highly specific topics, running around and hustled food, it is a welcomed calm break. It would be a pity only to see the picturesque city from the conference venue.
To put everything in a nutshell, a week of conference was more exhausting than I expected but it is a good chance to get out of the own bubble to see what others do and advertise for the own research as well as a good chance to see some nice places.