Confessions of a researchaholic

It will be great if SIGGRAPH (and other conferences) could have a new registration category called “social pass”. This social pass will be (significantly) cheaper than full registration, and is designed primarily for people who go to conferences mainly to socialize with colleagues. When I was in grad school I used to listen attentively to all the technical sessions, but nowadays (for better or worse) I found myself spending so much time chatting with people to the point that I serious doubt the value I paid for a full registration. I still go to many technical sessions, but my main purpose now turn to meet specific people (e.g. paper authors or people who work on related fields) and pay enough attention to the presentations so that I could have enough information to chat up with the authors later on. (Man, I like your presentation, especially demo XXX. What a cool paper!)

On a further thought, I could be tricky to design such a social pass. If I just want to talk to people in the hallways, I actually do not have to pay a dime and just need to walk into the convention center. But then that might not be enough, as a lot of the conversations happen inside the sessions (especially at the beginnings and ends) and the parties (most of which, hosted by various companies and research groups, I could already go for free). So I still need the credential to attend a certain subset of full registration.

Maybe one possibility is to charge for individual sessions so that I could pick only these that I plan to attend (to socialize). For the rest, I could simply loiter in the hallways and the parties.