A number of people will argue that Ph.D. students, especially those in technical fields, lack a decent social life. Well, I am certainly not going to risk making any such controversial statements. On the other hand, I do believe that a large part of our social life stems from professional relationships that are formed at different conferences and gatherings of professional communities. I have made some great friends at conferences and I enjoy corresponding/ meeting with them every now and then.
I am already a student member of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) which is
the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. I am particularly involved in the activities of SIGMM which is a special interest group in Multimedia. This community strives to build cutting edge multimedia technology through publications, conferences and special workshops that provide a platform for researchers world-wide to interact.
Another leading association is the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) which has similar structure of conferences, journals and workshops. What is different about the IEEE is that it also defines standards and measures for various technologies. The ACM and IEEE digital libraries are probably the highest visited sites by scientific community and are really a boon for students and researchers alike. By bringing global research to one's doorstep, they have truly enabled scientific progress like never before.
The impact of these organizations is even more visible in conferences. I attended the ACM Multimedia conference in 2006 and 2007 where I got to interact with leading researchers in multimedia community. ACM Multimedia is a conference that gives a flavor of all aspects of multimedia computing: from underlying technologies to applications, theory to practice, and servers to networks to devices. Other prominent conferences that I am interested in, are ICCV (International Conference on Computer Vision), ICPR (International Conference on Pattern Recognition), CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) and ACCV (Asian Conference on Computer Vision). I remember listening to Dr. Andrew Zisserman's keynote talk at the ACCV 2006 on VideoGoogle. This was the talk that inspired me to look into the problem of multimedia retrieval in the first place. Over last 3-4 years, I have closely followed the above conferences and become really interested in the aspects of pattern recognition and multimedia retrieval. I believe they have played an important role in making me want to become a researcher.
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