It is exciting getting together with other student volunteers from all around the world, chatting about the research and life. Experiencing different types of shifts is educational and allowed me to understand how a conference is organized and served. I appreciate the detailed and timely daily updates from Alisa and Ming-Ho during the conference, the tips they gave are very helpful for proceed our work smoothly.

I used to be impressed by some researchers from their published paper and their amazing work and this is the first time that I got a chance to meet and talk to those amazing researchers in person. This is entirely new experience to me and inspired me a lot.

I am also inspired by some talks that I attended. There are some other talks that I did not make it to attend due to time conflicts. Out of the ones that I attended, my favorite is the talk on Analyzing Duplication in JavaScript in the Benchwork session, given by Petr Maj. In the talk, Petr talked about how they mined GitHub repositories, how they pushed forward their research, how they adjusted the research goals, and presented their interesting findings. Petr presented their data in various format, it is an amazing talk. I also totally agree with the idea that Petr shared: the research plan does not always go hand in hand with actual research progress and that is what researchers need to introspect and adjust during the whole research cycle. Another talk that I liked a lot is the ISSTA keynote on Test Input Generation with Java PathFinder: Now and Then given by Sarfraz Khurshid, Corina Pasareanu, and Willem Visser. I particularly like the part that they explained what they could have done better when looking back now.

Overall, I appreciate the experience working as a student volunteer, attended the conference, and got inspired by people and their amazing work. I enjoyed it very much and hopefully see you soon!

Best,

Yingying