I was in Boston from May 4-May 7 at HP Techcon. HP Techcon is an HP internal technical conference where some of HP’s top technologists meet and present their work. Competition is extremely fierce and the probability of getting a paper accepted is lower than most technical conferences. HP has probably the widest portfolio of products in the technology industry and one gets to see and understand lots of interesting technologies during the course of this conference. HP’s memristor breakthrough was presented in this years Techcon and it was fascinating.

Techcon also provides opportunities to understand other HP businesses. I met a technologist from HP’s Procurve business. This is a fast growing business and it was fascinating to learn and understand HP’s strategy in this business.

I also got an opportunity to meet Bob Tarjan in a mentoring session. Bob is probably the youngest Turing award winner for his work on algorithms (in 1986). I had the pleasure of studying some of Bob’s algorithms in a graduate algorithms course (including the famous Sleator-Tarjan self adjusting trees algorithm). The professor who taught us this course humbly admitted that there was no way he could teach us to design algorithms like these. Meeting Bob was an inspirational experience. We chatted about the importance of doing good science and other HP specific topics.

HP also organizes a half day outing during the Techcon. I did the Boston city tour, we had a fantastic tour guide who cracked jokes all the while.