Review of the ART Forum, June, 2008
The 19th edition of the Advanced Research Techniques Forum provided three days (or four, for those who spent most of Sunday in tutorials) of engaging presentations, lively discussion, and spectacular views from the terrace restaurant at the Grove Park Inn. Paid attendance was healthy at 172, and with just over 200 including the presenters and program committee, we definitely had the critical mass needed for ART Forum.
The effort put in by the program committee members--reviewing abstracts, designing the program, and working with the presenters, paid off. We were blessed with some strong submissions for the program. Bryan Orme of Sawtooth Software remarked that he thought it was one of the best ART Forums he's attended.
The general session got a jump start from Vicki Morwitz' Monday morning presentation on the impact of response category breadth on survey results. This was voted the best presentation of the conference. We had a good selection of posters as well, and Eleanor Feit, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, was a repeat winner of the best poster award.
There were one or two hiccups this year. Due to "circumstances beyond our control," none of the authors of the Paul Green Award winning paper were able to attend the conference. When we learned this a few weeks before the conference, the committee decided to replace this presentation with a panel discussion on the intersection of the academic and practitioner worlds. This was the last session on Wednesday morning, just before the conference came to a close, but most participants stayed through to the end of the session. Panelists included--for the academics, Greg Allenby of The Ohio State University and Wagner Kamakura of Duke and, for the practitioners, Jackie Dawley of Insight Analysis and Brandon Paris of General Mills.
As you might know, in each half day session, there are four papers, presented in groups of two thematically related papers followed by 20 minutes of discussion. One unobtrusive measure of the quality of this year's program might be the fact that, for every session, the discussion was lively and filled the available time--and more.
I want to thank the program committee for their hard work: Cindy Ford, Brandon Paris, Chris Perkins, Joe Retzer, Wagner Kamakura, Anocha Aribarg, and Bruce Hardie. And thanks also to Lynn Brown of AMA, who served as Program Manager this year.
David Bakken
Chair of 2009 ART Forum
Vice-President, Harris Interactive