As many of you know (from my incessant Facebook posts and tweets), I traveled to Hong Kong! The purpose of my trip was to present a research paper at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2014), which took place in Hong Kong, from May 31 to June 5.
After the conference, I also spent two days as a tourist! Because I have too many stories (and photos and videos) to talk about, I decided to write three separate blog posts about my Hong Kong trip, as follows:
After the conference, I also spent two days as a tourist! Because I have too many stories (and photos and videos) to talk about, I decided to write three separate blog posts about my Hong Kong trip, as follows:
 Part I: ICRA 2014 |  Part II: Ocean Park |  Part 3: Big Buddha |
Before we get to the first part, check out the path (geodesic) that the airplane took to get to Hong Kong from New York City! That's right. Over the North Pole! I should have expected it given how the East Coast and Hong Kong have 12 hours of time difference.
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Without further adieu, let's get started with Part I, the conference! ICRA 2014 was hosted at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC). The place was huge! Our conference had more than a thousand attendees and yet we only used a fraction of HKCEC. The free wi-fi was a pleasant surprise. There's actually free wi-fi all over Hong Kong!
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The conference itself consisted of workshops, technical sessions, plenary talks, and the exhibition. I don't wanna bore you with the technical stuff so I'll just show a couple of photos and then go straight to the exhibitions, aka, THE ROBOTS!
This is me presenting my paper during one of the technical sessions. A friend of mine, Minas, took the photos below and tweeted them. Notice how we Greeks made up our own hashtag. The official one was #icra2014.
#GreeksAtICRA Great talk by @spmaniato pic.twitter.com/KrEflxpJLT
— Minas Liarokapis (@mliarokapis) June 3, 2014 I'll stop talking for a bit and let you enjoy the robots at the exhibition.
 Baxter by Rethink Robotics |  DARwIn-OP by ROBOTIS |  Nao by Aldebaran Robotics |
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Even though the conference did not offer much in terms of food, the banquet was pretty fancy and took place in HKCEC's huge main hall.
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After the first day of the conference, a bunch of us went to Victoria Harbour to watch the "Symphony of Lights" show. Check out a small portion of the show in the clip below.
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Then, we went to Ozone, which is the highest bar in the world (it's on the 118th floor of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Hong Kong). The view was sick!
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I'm gonna end with this amazing view of Victoria Harbour. Stay tuned for the remaining two parts: Ocean Park and Big Buddha!
~Spyros
