I attended the 14th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition at Kyoto, Japan from November 9th to November 15th. I and my colleague had a paper accepted at the ICDAR Workshop on Machine Learning and we had to go to the conference to present the paper. This was my first experience attending a research conference, and it wouldn’t have been possible without ACM-W.

Not knowing what to expect, I was excited to meet the people in the field of Document Analysis and Recognition and learn about their work. It was when I attended the first keynote session on 13th November, that I realized how big the research community of Document Analysis and Recognition(DAR) really was and how much the people of this community love it. It was a wonderful opportunity to learn about different problems that the different research labs were working on, and gain some interesting ideas to solve some of the problems that we were working on.

One of the workshops in the conference was on the future of DAR. Many points were put forward in the workshop by those who were experts working in this area. They discussed a variety of things, but the thing that struck me the most was the importance of reproducibility of one’s research results. Making one’s work usable for others, helps people like me, who are relatively new to the field to get started on their research journey.

I also got an opportunity to meet a few professors and interact with them to learn about their work. One of the professors that we met, Prof. P. Shivakumara, talked with us about the research community in general, his research experience, do’s and don’ts in the field of research. His advise was a much needed one. All in all, it was wonderful learning opportunity for me.

Finally, I would like thank the whole community of ACM-W for believing in me and offering me this scholarship. ICDAR and Japan were an unforgettable experience and I hope I can attend the future conferences to come.