Why attending conferences is important for your research

Abstract

In this paper, a personal perspective on how important for a scientist is to attend conferences is given. The report is influenced by the author's attendance of the 9th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2013). ESEC/FSE 2013 took place in Saint Petersburg, Russia and gathered researchers, practitioners, and educators from all over the world that presented and discussed the most recent work, trends, and challenges in the field of software engineering. ESEC/FSE joined the main conference, and several co-located events: two conferences, four workshops, doctoral symposium and seven tutorials. While the main conference covered broad topics in software engineering, the two co-located conferences were targeted to the specific software engineering community: multicore software engineering, performance, and tools, and to the search-based software engineering community. Additionally, there were four interesting workshops: on social software engineering, on software evolution, on software ecosystem architectures, and on software development lifecycle for mobile. Keywords Software engineering, discuss, attending conferences.