The conference

EMNLP-IJCNLP’19 was held in Hong Kong along with ConNLL, the venue was the Asia World Expo and it is immense!

There were four parallel tracks on top of the co-located conference and 17 workshops! Two of those were directly related to fake news, FEVER and NLP4IF, holding really interesting presentations and a shared task each. The level of the works presented throughout the whole conference was exceptional as expected.

A great number of published articles made direct or indirect usage of BERT, which was something often mentioned by peers I had the chance to discuss with. Another common topic amongst the participants was the ambitious talk by Noam Slonim, on behalf of IBM, that presented the Project Debater an extension of IBM Deep Blue and IBM Watson, now aiming to have a fully independent debater machine, that not only beats humans at chess or jeopardy!

On the final day, the gala dinner was held in Disney Land! The place was open exclusively to the participants of the event 😮! How cool is that? Needless to say, it was magical!

Some of the many pictures I took as reminders to check interesting works.
Memorable moment proving that three senior computer science doctors are not enough to set up a projector.

Holidays

I took the opportunity to stay for a week of holidays after the conference and was amazed by the place: the organization of the streets with their elevated pedestrian corridors with interconnected buildings crossing bridges over the streets makes it possible for a long walk across the city without the need to be on the ground. The city is famously known for its light spectacles at night and for the high population density.

(1) Massive residential complexes being build by China along with an incentive to Chinese people to move to HK.
(2) The beautiful view across Kowloon Bay at night, a great spot to watch the lights show!
(3) The famous 'Monster Building', an icon of HK's dense population.
(4) Got enough time to go hiking three or four times and experienced some really nice sunsets! 🌅

Needless to say that the food was spectacular and exquisite at the same time, I have indulged myself with as much ramen and sushi as I could but also took my time to try different dishes and even find some fruits I didn’t expect to ever see outside of Brazil. 🍈 Here are a selection of pictures, I have many more! 🍣

Food, food, food and more food!!!

The night life in the city is also really something! Many nightclubs and people on the streets! Oh, the life pre-covid19…

(1) Check how many people on the streets! Unimaginable to have this in the pandemic we are experiencing now!
(2) This club had a ceiling filled with real butterflies! It's a pity I didn't take a better picture...
(3) The city is quite cosmopolitan and every alley gives off a different 'vibe'!

To top it off, I got myself a handmade suit, tailored especially for me! 🤵

My stay over the city happened amidst a series of protests from the Hong Kong people against the will of China to take over control of that region. The matter is quite complex and has roots that are more than a century old, back when the UK “discovered” the peninsula/archipelago. I recommend reading from various sources before committing to an opinion but a brief and a short description of the matter can be found here.

Some of the usual scenes happening in Hong Kong during the protests. What amazed me the most was how readily cleaned and fixed things were after the damage was dealt.