The 8th Industrial Conference on Data Mining, held in Leipzig, was clearly the most worthwile conference for me so far. There were no parallel sessions, I was able to talk for about 30 minutes, presenting the paper from the proceedings as well as some things that would otherwise have been future work. And, most important, I had immediate and massive feedback: roughly ten questions right at the end of my talk and another one or two hours of discussion with other authors during the breaks or the socializing events. Moreover, I even understood most of the other talks and was interested in hearing them which was not quite the case for the recent IPMU conference. If I have some interesting work to show, I will clearly apply for next year’s ICDM, too.

Nevertheless, the four day event was exhausting — but I could commute to and from Leipzig to Magdeburg easily, leaving room for the daily F.A.Z. lecture. I had not expected this conference to be that informative, inspiring and practical, but it clearly was. The head of IBAI Institute, Petra Perner could not chair the conference for some reason, but Andrea Ahlemeyer-Stubbe did a perfect job in the organization part, as well as the rest of the team. For showing some of the conference participants around Leipzig, I should have taken Mimi there, who only last year moved in with me in Magdeburg. There’s still some things in my own work that need to be organized and sorted, which this conference helped enormously with. Great!