Last Friday afternoon, Ian Gorton wrapped up the four days of the Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC) 2006 programme with a simple closing address. It was a huge week, and fantastic to see it all go off so well. Kudos to Ian – the conference general chair – for making it all happen.
Jun Han and I were the program chairs for the research papers at the conference. A lot of our preparation finished a few months ago, coordinating an international committeee of referees for the research papers submitted to the conference. We had the largest number of papers ever submitted to ASWEC (112) and finally accepted 41 to be presented. They’ve been published by IEEE Computer Society in a hard-copy proceedings, but the papers are also available electronically.
This year we built on the success of ASWEC 2005 in involving industry. We mixed the industry and research presentations together, had great keynote speakers, featured technical presentations from our sponsors talking about their areas of thought leadership, and had a huge response to the industry-focussed tutorial programme. Anna Liu and Chris Skinner pulled together the industry presentations, and Paul Mackie was key in getting the sponsors involved so well.
The conference finance chair Paul Bannerman was enjoying Fiji and so wasn’t there to see the results of his hard work. But Liming Zhu was – he’d made the website and submission systems run. The ATP was a great venue, we were very pleased with AVCorp who provided audio-visual equipment and support throughout the conference, and the food at Sugaroom was superb for the conference dinner. It was all good. Thanks to everyone who helped organise the conference!
After Ian’s closing address, a crowd of organisers and others kicked on to the after-party to celebrate what had been the biggest and perhaps best ASWEC ever. The after-party-goers enjoyed my homebrew (or at least politely feigned enjoyment of it! 🙂 ) – a good way to finish a great week.