ICDM25 Travel Blog

Flight to Washington, D.C.

Thanks to the University of Florida’s robust travel booking tools, I was able to book an economical flight from Orlando International Airport (MCO) to Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA). I arrived early for my Southwest Flight about 800 miles north and waited until takeoff. Near 11pm, I arrived in DC and made conversation with the local Lyft driver as he took me to the hotel.

MCO is a very busy airport while the terminals at DCA are small by way of comparison, and I explored them thoroughly as I waited for my return flight after the conference. The ceilings are brown with a shiny gold trim everywhere, and it reminded me of the aesthetics present in Grand Central Station, NYC. I deeply regret not getting a photo of the place for this post.

Eating in Washington, D.C.

While I was in Washington, D.C., I had to eat. I stood in a hotel several blocks from the Capital Hilton, where the conference was held, in the direction of Georgetown and very near the George Washington University campus. To sample the available faire, I would walk outside of my hotel the nights that I stood there, and I would traverse the blocks nearby to find dinner. I passed many bars but did not drink, and I found that many places closed early in D.C. Wednesday night, I became intimately acquainted with the prices that food commands in the city, and I was somewhat disappointed but not shocked. Mark ups of a few dollars over what I would pay in Florida for the same food were not uncommon, and I stumbled through the blocks near my hotel looking for a deal.

That night, I approached a small cafe-style restaurant called Grill Kabob that was built into the ground floor of a skyscraper on 19th street. I walked up to the counter and ordered a gyro and a drink for about $18. I thought to myself as waited on the other end of the long counter, sitting a nearby table, and hoped that it would be worth the money. As I waited, I stared at one of the walls and my eyes caught sight of three large Persian rugs. One was clearly weaved into a map of some kind, but the text denoting place names was in a script I couldn't read, and the others proudly showed off intricate geometric art.

Then the food was ready, and my $18 was money well spent. To my surprise, the sandwich game with a pleasant lentil soup and I ate it eagerly as an appetizer before working on the gyro. The shawarma gyro that I had ordered was heavy in my hands, and I was quite excited by the amount of meat that must have contributed to the weight in my hands as I lifted it up to my mouth. The lamb was seasoned well enough to make it zesty but not so much that I would call it spicy. It was served on pita with an ample topping of lettuce and tomato, and a drizzle of dill tzatziki added a significantly savory undertone to the whole dish which I amplified with additional tzatziki from a bottle that Grill Kabob kept at the table.

Other nights, I managed to eat well on a reasonable budget, but each of those meals paled in comparison to the gyro I had Wednesday, Nov. 13th. The only comparable meal was the one I had at a social event held by the ICDM organizers at the International Spy Museum on the other side of town. There, we ate fine Chinese cuisine including many dishes that I had never seen at American Chinese restaurants. I was well pleased with the meal as I mixed with the other conference goers there, but my experience with the gyro at Grill Kabob was more intimate since I was alone that evening.

The morning I left, I also had a great brunch at a coffee shop near the teaching hospital and George Washington University's campus. Near a statue of George Washington on Horseback, about 60 degrees on a roundabout from the hospital, there was a coffee shop called Fabulous Market & Cafe. I was looking for breakfast and had already begrudgingly paid about $10 for a 16oz drink at another location nearer my hotel, but I am a diehard caffeine addict, so I was excited to see that a cup of coffee was about $3 there with a half-price refill policy. Additionally, the man behind the counter was serving sausage, egg and cheese sandwiches on the customer's choice of English muffin or bagel for just $6. I ordered a coffee and bagel for starters and, since it was a Sunday, took some time to catch up on the new Weekly Shonen Jump on my phone while I waited for the meal to be ready. Minutes later, the restauranteur came to my table with the bagel sandwich served on a weaved basket shaped like a boat. I was surprised by the presentation and admired it so much that I took a picture for this blog. The savory meat, egg and cheese I ate after taking it was not disappointing either.

Social Events

There were multiple coffee breaks each day at ICDM, and there was an hour-long buffet style lunch served around noon each day. The coffee breaks were informal mixers where I met numerous other researchers interested in data mining and learned from them about the research in that field. At the lunches I fell in with a crowd of researchers including a German woman; a vice president of Fidelity Investments who is studying for his Ph.D in Cincinnati; and a few Polish researchers, with at least one editor from the IEEE.

In addition, there was also the poster sessions. At the Thursday poster session in which I displayed my poster on OPTiCAL, I met another researcher and new connection named Lele Cao, Ph.D and Senior Principal Researcher at King, the makers of Candy Crush. His poster was on the opposite side of the same board as mine, and it features prominently in my recollection of the academic highlights from ICDM.

International Spy Museum

By far, however, the most important social event of the whole conference was the trip to the International Spy Museum that we purchased with our registration for the conference. The event was held at a museum on the Potomac River, and it was across the street from the USPS headquarters, which was adorned with special signage dozens of feet high and wide pronouncing the USPS’s semiquincentennial. It was about an hour's walk from the Capital Hilton where ICDM was held, and getting to the location involved a pleasant walk past the White House, Department of the Treasury and the Washington Monument.

Everyone who opted in received a ticket for the event at registration inside the plastic sleeve that laminated a paper placard with their name and affiliation. When we arrived at the museum, the tickets were redeemed and taken from us before we boarded one of three elevators that were attended by museum staff. These took us all to the top floor of the museum, which was a ballroom with tall glass windows overlooking the city. From it, the conference-goers could see DCA, the Washington Monument, and the Capitol Building in the distance. Pictured here is a replica of James Bond's Aston Marten which the museum proudly displays at the entrance behind a glass window looking out from the building's facade to the USPS headquarters.

At the party, I ate and conversed with many people from the conference at length, and when the crowds were thinning, I explored the venue with the friends I had made along the way.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to the IEEE and event organizers at the conference and to all the new connections I made there for making ICDM both informative and entertaining. I enjoyed myself each day and learned much about data mining research in the current era of ML and LLMs. I looked ahead to NeurIPS, where I would be making a new presentation, with increased confidence.

For more information about our research, return to our homepage: ufdatastudio.com.