The ASPLOS experience.

I came to ASPLOS for the first time this year. I enjoyed the sessions which I attended, but I find the most value from conferences in the interactions and connections to be made (while you can read a paper after a conference or look at slides, talking to people face-to-face is a bit more difficult...). I felt that ASPLOS was very conducive of this; and the hotel had plenty of space outside of the conference rooms for people to mingle and chat, and the excursion was at a nice open location with plenty of opportunity to randomly bump into different people.

Of the sessions I attended, I felt that while it was clear that while great effort was put into some presentations, there were a few presentations that were very disappointing and hard to understand. While I am sensitive to the fact that not everyone is a native English speaker, and this problem may have occurred since ASPLOS appeared to be particularly diverse this year, I think that the community at large should engage in discussion on how to improve on the quality of presentations in general. It is difficult to have a productive academic discourse when basic communication is a problem.

Apart from that, I enjoyed that ASPLOS strived to be interdisciplinary, and that there was a healthy mix of students, academics and industry at the conference (in contrast to ISCA, where there were much fewer students). I believe that travel grants really help make this possible, especially for students who do not have a paper at the conference.