Keynote Talk 1

Summary form only given. One day, when Dr. Chain Mazelle woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his office into a horrible vermin, a conference keynote speaker. He was leaning in his uncomfortable chair, in front of a keynote slide where someone had written the words “My Name is Nobody”. “What´s happened to me?” he thought. It wasn´t a dream. His office, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of paper drafts and unfinished grant proposals lay spread out on the desk - Dr. Mazelle was a software engineering academic - and above it there hung a lonely best paper award in a nice, gilded frame. Dr. Mazelle then turned to look out the window at the dull weather. Drops of rain could be heard hitting the grids, which made him feel quite sad. “How about if I work a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense”, he thought, but that was something he was unable to do because he was used to leaning forward, and in his present state he couldn´t get into that position. However hard he threw himself forward, he always rolled back to where he was. He must have tried it a hundred times, shut his eyes so that he wouldn´t have to look at the eagerly humming computer, and only stopped when he began to feel a mild, dull pain there that he had never felt before. “Oh, God”, he thought, “what a strenuous career it is that I´ve chosen! Researching day in and day out. This takes much more effort than just teaching, and on top of that there´s the curse of travelling, worries about making connections, procrastinating PhD students, and getting papers accepted, bad and irregular conference food, contact with different people all the time so that you can never get to know anyone or become friendly with them. It can all go to Hell!”