Is being held here in Pittsburgh!
It actually started yesterday, although I was pre-occupied with sending both my father and Yuan to the airport, and the rain discouraged me from coming out again later in the evening.
Attending in-town conferences always present a difficulty in balancing between classes (which I decided to ditch), research work (some last minute SEM work), and sessions. And with all that, there's the other difficulty of picking which sessions to attend due to overlaps.
That being said, I did attend some very good and novel talks on grain boundary quantification, specifically looking at the topology of grain boundary networks as well as how to further/properly classify triple junctions from stereology. It'll be hard to find someone doing the exact same work as you (after all that is research), but there will always be similarities. However, in most cases, I find that these talks simply either reinforce what I already know, or challenge me to think a little bit harder about what my data is showing. Intrinsically, this might be a little bit of a research competition kick to think what can I show or prove better.
The talks that I come away with the most are normally those that aren't related to my research directly though. They're indirectly related in that their objective is looking for another method of characterization (typically through heavy mathematics). Although the reasoning behind this is most likely due to the fact that annealing twins have more or less been very well documented now (despite the lack of explanation still for the last hundred years). Therefore it isn't that we need more experimental work necessarily, but more ways to consider how we approach the problem and what we're looking for. I consider how these ideas can be applied to my own research then, and very generally what information it may provide that is different from what we haven't seen already.
Unfortunately I will not be doing the same courtesy as I just mentioned above, but I will still be presenting a poster tomorrow.
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