Committees insAIde: The SymCo

Sat, 3 Oct 2020

written by Elizardo Laclé

But actually written by: Zuzanna Fendor

Have you ever stumbled upon the question: "How do I organise a large event and a symposium in particular?" Well, now you certainly have stumbled upon it in this blog post. Luckily for you, there is a way of answering that question: join SymCo.

The SymCo:

The Sym(posium)Co(mmittee) is the committee that (unsurprisingly) organises the Annual CognAC Artificial Intelligence Symposium, or for short ACAIS. The symposium has a different theme each year which the SymCo decides. Despite the fact that the symposium is usually somewhere in the spring, the SymCo is already working hard at the beginning of the academic year. The reason? There is simply much that has to be done before the ACAIS is reality. Amongst other things the committee chooses a theme, searches for speakers that are relevant in that field and a suitable location needs to be found. The challenge is to keep this within a reasonable budget! But fear not, all of these tasks are split amongst the members. This makes the workload very doable whilst still giving everyone their own challenge.

My experience:

The SymCo was the first CognAC committee I've joined. Although organising a symposium can be a lot of work at times, it is still manageable. Even for a newbie like I was at the time. I found it very rewarding to see the pieces slowly come together as we approached the day of the symposium. Sadly, due to the Corona Crisis, we had to rearrange all of these pieces last minute. This required us to be flexible as well as innovative. Luckily we made it work and hosted an online symposium (which can be found here). In the end, I've learned a lot from this experience and I would recommend it to anyone who seeks a challenge or wants to work on a variety of skills. I have seen people improve skills such as planning and communication but also things like website building and crafting (all those posters won't make themselves...). However there are many others that you can explore as well!

If you are interested in making this years version of the ACAIS a great succes you can join us by sending an email to intern@svcognac.nl.