It had been a while since I went to a large conference. No thanks to the pandemic. But last week I was back at the American Chemical Society national conference. This one was in San Francisco; I’ve blogged about my usual conference activities at such a meeting. While there were a few individuals who wore masks, it mostly felt like a pre-COVID conference. There didn’t seem to be social-distancing anxiety and folks were happy to shake hands instead of just elbow-bump.
This was in contrast to a smaller regional conference (~100 people) I attended last October, which was my first in-person conference in almost three years. Almost everyone was masked, appropriately so since the small lecture theater barely accommodated us – the organizers were not expecting such a good turnout. I guess we were itching to get back in person. I did take off my mask when I was speaking at the podium, as did the other speakers.
One of the themes of the big San Francisco meeting was Artificial Intelligence applications and machine learning. I went to several high-quality talks presented by folks from both academia and industry. Some were well attended, others sparsely so. This is a field that is moving very quickly, hype notwithstanding. I’m not an expert in machine learning, although I am picking up the newest lingo, and I have some basic knowledge of how computational neural networks work.
Of all the talks I attended this time around, three stood out. One was a machine-learning talk on protein engineering that had underlying intriguing results to protein evolution. I don’t think the speaker had origin-of-life research in mind, but it gave me an idea of how that research could be extended. Another was a statement that a speaker made in a Q&A, essentially that living systems invert our standard thermodynamic model. In a standard G-Chem or P-Chem undergraduate course, the environment (thermal surroundings, modeled by a water bath) is considered to be a large reservoir that is relatively invariant while the chemical system is where all the “changes” are taking place. However, living systems maintain homeostasis and stay out of equilibrium while adapting to the environment changing. I liked the pithy contrast!
The third talk was unusual. I was in a session celebrating valence bond theory where almost all the speakers talked about research. However, one person chose to talk about how he was incorporating valence bond theory into P-Chem. This is not the (pathetically simplistic) valence bond theory of G-Chem, but the more sophisticated version that quantum chemists use. I had started incorporating bits of this into my quantum course, and I’ve been trying to slowly enlarge that share, since my expertise is in chemical bonding. This has meant cutting out some other parts (including math). Anyway, I very much enjoyed the talk and it sparked some ideas that I plan on trying.
Overall a good conference, and that takes my travel tally to four in-person meetings this calendar year so far (which included going to the ESCIP and LABSIP workshops, sort of like mini-conferences). It’s refreshing to return to in-person conferencing after a lapse of several years. I’ve missed the interactions between fellow human beings without an intervening screen or device!
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