ADBIS was the first conference I ever participated in. In this blog, I talked about ADBIS 1996, but there were four total conferences I participated in.
In 1993, I just sat there and listened, pretending I understood something.
In 1994, I had a chance to give a “short presentation,” which was supposed to be something like lightning talks nowadays: one slide, five minutes of talk. However, the session chair was either unaware of how that was supposed to work or didn’t trust me to be able to say something legibly. He just said a couple of sentences about me and my work and waved me back to my seat.
It was 1994, and I was not yet Hettie you all know, so I returned to my seat. The unexpected consequence of this disaster was that almost all of the “nobilities” approached me at the reception and told me how sorry they were that I was not given a chance to say a word. I became exceptionally popular on the spot, to the point that I didn’t have time to eat all the delicious food at the reception. And finally, in 1995, I had a chance to actually present the 20-minute talk, which was accepted by an international CfP committee, and was well-received at the conference.
That’s all to say, that this September, I am going to present a two-hour tutorial at ADBIS 2025! I am excited and a little bit nervous, but more excited :).
Hettie's Reflections 