OOPSLA 2005

OOPSLA 2005

OOPSLA 2005 was held in San Diego, California. For the second year, I received an educators scholarship to attend the conference. The total value of the scholarship this year was $1815. In addition, I used frequent flyer miles to obtain a free airline ticket. The conference was held at the Town and Country Resort & Convention Center just off Interstate-8. This link shows an aerial photograph of the facility (center), the Fashion Valley Mall (upper left), the San Diego River (between them) and the Fashion Valley Transit Center (red trolley cars between the river and the shopping center). The conference was held in the convention facilities on site and one event occurred in the Food Court of the Fashion Valley Mall.

There is a bridge crossing the San Diego River connecting the convention site with the transit center and mall. I took a picture of the river from the bridge as I crossed it to board the San Diego Trolley (tram) at the transit center. Because of its proximity to a golf course, a mall and a transit center, this resort is in an excellent location -- especially for international attendees at the conference. It seemed to me that very few attendees rented a car.

If you look carefully, you will see a person on the left bank of the river fishing. He is wearing a western hat and is standing near the base of the horizontal tree.

At the transit center, I took the trolley two stops to Westfield Shoppingtown Mission Valley. I took a picture of one of the trams there. This "shoppingtown" was a rather large retail complex that had a number of different shops and restaurants. I managed to find an Orange Julius there and also ate at the In 'N Out Burger nearby.

This is a picture of the tram I took back to the Fashion Valley Transit Center.

Breaks during the conference were held in a large patio next to a swimming pool and one of the conference buildings (on the left). That particular conference building contained the posters submitted to the conference. During the break, we could wander in and see the posters or speak with attendees.

As you can see from this picture, the grounds had a great deal of vegetation. The palm trees were especially spectacular.

During this particular break I met Prof. Ralph E. Johnson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and asked if I could take a picture of him with his "Illinois" shirt. I know it looks Hawaiian, but check out the colors (orange and blue: school colors of UIUC) and, if you look carefully, you can see the big 'I' on the shirt.

Prof. Johnson was conference chair for OOPSLA 2005. He is a very interesting person and it was a lot of fun to speak with him.

At this same reception, I also saw (left-to-right in the picture below) Carl Alphonce and Adrienne Decker from the State University of New York at Buffalo and took their picture with Dr. Guy Steele from Sun Microsystems. I had met and spoken with Carl and Adrienne before, but I had not spoken with Dr. Steele before.

It was a great honor to meet Dr. Steele and speak with him about our comparative language course. He made some excellent suggestions to me as to how I could improve my teaching of that course.

One of the themes of this conference involved creativity. Several talks and events focused on this theme. On Tuesday evening, we headed off to the Food Court of the Fashion Valley Mall for a "happening" designed by George Platts, our artist in residence at the conference. Called "Munch, Muse, Mooch, Mutter, Mix and Mingle at the Mall" (7M), it involved the participants following George's suggestions for activities as signaled by a duck call that he blew loudly. At the end, the participants all gathered in a group and threw balls of colored yarn back and forth tying the group in what I termed "object-oriented spaghetti code." The following two pictures show the results of this activity.

Since these activities for 7M were all done in public, I was a bit embarrassed. When I expressed my concern to others ("What will the local people think of all this?"), they replied that the locals were all Californians and would probably ignore our activities. As I looked around the food court, I noticed that it was true: the locals all ignored us just as if we were not there. Ah, California!

I attended the Educator's Symposium chaired by Prof. Eugene Wallingford (University of Northern Iowa). This year, 2005, is the last year he will chair the Educator's Symposium. I caught him just after one of the sessions and asked if I could take his picture. This is the result.

At the conference, I also met many other educators. This particular picture is an excellent picture of Joe Hummel from Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois. I attended his Faculty Summer Workshop on "Modern Software Development with .Net" at Lake Forest College in 2003.

Joe is an outstanding teacher and this picture is one of the proofs of his dedication to and interest in teaching. I took this picture as most of the attendees (myself included) headed out for a visit to the San Diego Zoo. Joe was staying back at the conference site so that he could work on material for his CS 461 Compiler Design course.

There was an area set aside at the conference for attendees to engage in creative activities under the tutelage of George Platts. Dr. Guy Steele and Prof. Gerald Jay Sussman of MIT decided to see what video feedback looked like with the digital system set up at the conference. The results were extremely interesting.

This is a picture of the result with Prof. Sussman to the right of the screen. Feedback was obtained by pointing a video camera at the screen that was displaying what the video camera was "seeing." They also adjusted the camera to reverse the colors that it was "seeing." In this picture, the camera is tilted so that the white border in the upper right and lower right are the top and right side respectively of the black border of the monitor. In this particular picture, Dr. Steele is holding one of the lenses of his glasses in the field of view of the camera.

This is a picture of the setup with Dr. Steele putting things in the field of view of the camera with the resultant picture on the screen. Prof. Sussman is just off the right of the picture.

When they were finished, Dr. Steele took some pictures of the monitor with his digital camera. Dr. Steele received his Ph. D. in Computer Science from MIT in 1980 under the supervision of Prof. Sussman.

Last updated 01/08/2006.