My opinion is that going to poster sessions, orals, pre-researching papers etc. at ICML/ICLR/NeurIPS is pretty valuable for new researchers and I wish I had done this before having any papers (you don’t need to have any papers to go to a conference). See also Thomas Kwa’s comment about random intuitions learnt from going to a conference.
After this, I agree with Leo that I think it would be a waste of my time to go to papers/orals/preresearch papers. Maybe there’s some value in this for conceptual research but for most empirical work I’m very skeptical (most papers are not good, but it takes my time to figure out whether a paper is good or not, etc.)
Stance like ‘going to poster sessions is great for young researchers, I don’t do it anymore and just meet friends’ is high-status, so, on priors, I would expect people to take it more than what’s optimal.
Realistically, poster session is ~1.5h, maybe 2h with skimming what to look at. It is relatively common for people in AI to spend many hours per week digesting what are the news on twitter. I really doubt the per hour efficiency of following twitter is better than of poster sessions when approached intentionally. (While obviously aimlessly wandering between endless rows of posters is approximately useless.)
Going to posters for works you already know to talk to authors seems a great idea and I do it. Re-reading your OP, you suggest things like checking papers are fake or not in poster sessions. Maybe you just meant papers that you already knew about? It sounded as if you were suggesting doing this for random papers, which I’m more skeptical about.
My opinion is that going to poster sessions, orals, pre-researching papers etc. at ICML/ICLR/NeurIPS is pretty valuable for new researchers and I wish I had done this before having any papers (you don’t need to have any papers to go to a conference). See also Thomas Kwa’s comment about random intuitions learnt from going to a conference.
After this, I agree with Leo that I think it would be a waste of my time to go to papers/orals/preresearch papers. Maybe there’s some value in this for conceptual research but for most empirical work I’m very skeptical (most papers are not good, but it takes my time to figure out whether a paper is good or not, etc.)
I’m skeptical of the ‘wasting my time’ argument.
Stance like ‘going to poster sessions is great for young researchers, I don’t do it anymore and just meet friends’ is high-status, so, on priors, I would expect people to take it more than what’s optimal.
Realistically, poster session is ~1.5h, maybe 2h with skimming what to look at. It is relatively common for people in AI to spend many hours per week digesting what are the news on twitter. I really doubt the per hour efficiency of following twitter is better than of poster sessions when approached intentionally. (While obviously aimlessly wandering between endless rows of posters is approximately useless.)
I agree that twitter is a worse use of time.
Going to posters for works you already know to talk to authors seems a great idea and I do it. Re-reading your OP, you suggest things like checking papers are fake or not in poster sessions. Maybe you just meant papers that you already knew about? It sounded as if you were suggesting doing this for random papers, which I’m more skeptical about.
I presumed that Jan meant doing it for papers that had survived the previous “read the titles” and “read the abstracts” filtering stages.