Munich, days 2 and 3
March 11th, 2008 at 9:22 pm10.03.2008
I ate breakfast at the hotel and headed to the train station to reach the conference center. The time was around 7:30 AM and the station was very busy. As I’ve mentioned before, Munich’s public transportation system is just terrific, and it seems that most people use it and not cars to move around (the traffic on the streets is quite light). There was a huge stream of people walking from the inter-city trains (probably coming from the suburbs) to the internal ground and underground train stations.
It’s quite cheap too. I purchased a 3-day ticket for 12 Euros, that allows me free and unlimited movement on Munich’s public transport in the limits of the city. I later found out you can even buy a longer-term ticket that is even cheaper. Considering the other prices around here (very expensive !) it’s obvious that the government is encouraging people to move around by public transport.
It’s a 20-minute ride to the conference center (Munich Messe ICM) from the central station (Hauptbanhof) by the U2 subway line. I arrived, received my badge and an information booklet and headed to the lectures.
The first day of the conferences included tutorial sessions. The first half-day tutorial I attended was about Heterogenous systems design with SystemC. Can’t say I learned much, as the tutorials were neither informative, nor well presented.
After lunch I was feeling bad about sitting inside while the weather outside looked nice and sunny, and decided to walk around the conference center. That was a miscalculation, as I didn’t realize how huge it is. It took me more than 40 minutes of well-paced walking, which sets it at about 4 km in perimeter. It has about 30 entrance gates, with huge parking lots outside, and two subway stations that serve it. I suppose they have really huge exhibitions / fairs here. The halls inside are also huge.
Afterwards, the second half-day tutorial was about soft errors in processors. It was presented by an Indian guy from Stanford University and by an Asian lady from IBM in Boston. Though his English was worse, he was much more entertaining. Overall the lectures were good and interesting.
It ended at 18:00, and there was a “reception” which consisted of beer / wine with nuts and potato chips. After that, I went out of the ICM and headed to the nearby mall. It’s your typical shopping mall, nothing special. I entered Saturn - a huge electronics and appliances store, and spent some time strolling in it. On the way back in the subway I met two Israelis who also attended the conference, but parted ways with them, as I wanted to visit Marieplatz (the main square in the city center) again. So I switched from U-bahn to S-bahn and walked from Marieplatz back to the hotel. On the way I stopped for dinner at “Coffee Fellows” and ate a bagel and a muffin with a bottle of Snapples juice. They had about 10 kinds of bagels in there. Overall, Germans are very diverse in their food. In stores there are dozens of types of cheese and sausage, the choice is huge.
11.03.2008
Same as yesterday, I headed to the conference center right after breakfast. Today the conference itself has begun and with it the exhibition, so the amount of people is very large. At the beginning there was a keynote speech by the organizers and some big guns in the industry. Overall, there are pretty high standing people around here. For example, one of the speakers at the keynote was a VP of technology in Thales, the French engineering giant. The guy manages 24,000 engineers ! In a later “executive panel” there were VPs and CTOs from Synopsis, Mathworks, Altera and Infenion. Also there are many known professors from the field of design automation and test (known not to me, but definitely to many other conference participants).
The people here are from all around the world. Many PhD students. Most people came alone so they seek other people to chat to. So far I talked with people from Norway, Ireland, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, India and Israel. One of the “Norwegians” turned out to be an Iranian who studies his PhD in Norway. We sat next to each other at lunch and had a nice chat. I counted at least 4 other Iranians, only by looking at name tags. One was even lecturing in one of the sessions I attended, though I didn’t understand anything, both because it was a completely unrelated theoretical topic, and because he was very nervous and could hardly put 2 sentences together.
After the keynotes and executive session the conference paper presentations began. I was desperately trying to find something not too academic, with mixed success. Before lunch the lectures I went to were really useless, and after lunch a bit better, though nothing really worth keeping an eye on. On the other hand, the exhibition is very interesting, and I decided to take active participation in it by actually speaking with the people at the booths and watching their presentations. So I had a nice chat with the guys from Verific, who develop VHDL and Verilog parsers. It appears that they’ve heard of Focs - the tool I was working on at IBM, since they were looking around for parsers for PSL. I spoke with other representatives as well, from Doulos (where I heard an enlightening explanation of where SystemC is really used), Forte, CAST (IP providers) and probably others whom I don’t recall now. I will keep it up tomorrow - it’s a good way to learn about stuff.
At the end of the day there was a reception with beer again. I end up every day here by drinking beer. It’s becoming a habit - one that’s difficult to avoid when you’re in Munich 
I also met a couple of familiar Israelis from IBM in Haifa and a Russian guy who works in IBM’s Watson center in New York.
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