This year has seen me on two conferences – Dynamic Walking at Universisty of Wisconsin at Madison and ASME’s IDETC MSNDC conference in St. Louis (MI). The experience could not have been different.

Dynamic Walking

Announced quite late, I was happy to hear that Dynamic Walking would happen again. I have attended on and off since 2008 and was really excited to go back. The application required an unusual 1-1-1 submission, i.e. one video of one minute length with one slide. Luckily my colleage recently build a fancy light board and so here is my application:

The conference itself has been inspiring and motivating. I have known Peter Adamczyk for quite a while and he and his team did a great job to organize an excellent meeting. I have also been happy to meet Kreg Gruben for the first time in person and was awed by the treadmill he built at this lab.

We had a lot of fun in and around Wisconsin, met our project partners from Stuttgart and a lot of colleages, I had not seen in a long time. Next years Dynamic Walking will be organized by DLR in Munich – the bar has been lifted fairly high.

ASME IDETC MSNDC

I had been to IDETC before – a behemoth of a meeting with 10 conferences running in paralell covering all aspects of mechanical engineering. As there has been a session on biomechanics in the MSNDC conference I decided to submit a paper. The online submission program was as slight pain, but the the paper itself, after jumping through a couple of hoops concerning copyright and the like has been quite well received.
Briefly after, about 3 month before the conference, we were asked to submit our presentation in video form – who on this earth has a presentation ready more than a couple of days before the conference?? I had to sneak my way around this and submitted an old video which gave me time until one week before leaving for St. Louis to upload my final version.

St. Louis turned out to be a disappointingly boring place – I have seen the river front, I have been to what was advertised as the bar and party district – but not much there. The conference hotel (I actually stayed nearby) was quite impressive as it used to be St. Louis main train station. The conference was not impressive at all – little social events for networking, little focus in the talk and the temperature in the conference hall near freezing. I ultimately decided to leave a day early out of frustration. At least there is a publication out now ^​1​, which has been published on Nov. 11th, 2022 but I am still having trouble to get a copy at this point.