These days, I were attending to the ITiCSE conference in Vilnius, Lithuania. As usual, I did not really over-prepare the trip and while I was waiting for the flight, I was still wondering of the kind of alphabet that Lithuanian was using. Left with no clue (and no internet connection), I was kinda guessing that it will be close to Russian, meaning completely impossible to understand for me, either spoken or written. I was completely wrong actually, they are using a latin alphabet and even if I'm still unable to get more than "please" and "thanks" when I hear people speaking, I can recognize quite a lot of written words. And I must say that I really enjoyed the few that I saw from the country and its inhabitants.

A crazy thing is that the conference occurred in the Lithuanian parliament. I remember going to the French one last February when we did those presentations about computer science to the senators, and it was a nightmare to enter the building. Lots of military, most parts of the building forbidden. Here on the contrary, the security at entrance was really light, we were completely to move along, and we were using the wireless network of the building, which happens to be completely open (there were no wifi in the French sénat, either open or closed. Maybe hidden?). I even managed to lose my bag for one hour within the building and no, they did not nuke it down. Instead, they returned it to me with a smile! Most of the sessions were occurring in the main room of the assembly! We were actually sitting were the senators of that country usually sit (I guess). So, of course, I paid attention to always sit on the left side of the room

As always with the ITiCSE conference, I've heard a whole lot of super interesting presentations and met some really nice people. There is at least 2 groups with who I spoke and that I can really consider to visit for a week or two during the next months.

At the end, I presented the following slides, and I think that the presentation went quite well. I was not short on time as I was suspecting so I could give every details that I wanted. That's good because my presentation went a bit further than the paper that we wrote maybe 6 months ago. A lot occurred in the PLM since then. I'm particularly proud of the slides 9, 10 and 11. It costed me quite a few sleep hours yesterday to get them right After the presentation, several people came to me to speak about how they could use our tool in their context, so this is great. Actually, that's probably one of the best conference talk I've given...

Click on the image to download the presentation.