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Fig. 9. Assigning times and rooms for sessions.
June 30-July 4, 2008–The Meeting
The opening session was held on Monday morning, June 30. SFA Co-chair Manell Zakharia, the primary organizer of the meeting, gave an introduction to the events for the week. He was followed by welcoming talks from the presidents of the three primary sponsoring organizations (Gilles Daigle, ASA; Luigi Maffei, EAA; Jean Kergomard, SFA) and ASA Co- Chair William Yost (Fig. 11). Mark Lipinski, Vice President for Region Î1e de France, gave an interesting talk in which he reviewed how Acoustics’08 Paris was rated to receive support funds from the French government. He reported that the conference received high scores on everything with the one exception—the low number of women registrants. Musician PuceMuse gave a sound and light performance which con- cluded the opening ceremony.
It is impossible to review the scientific contributions from this meeting in this article, other than to note that bringing so many experts from around the world to one site provided the opportunity for acousticians to delve into their own specific subjects as well as to learn what is current in related fields and acoustics in general. The poster sessions were held in the corridors, and drew large crowds (Fig. 12). Readers interested in highlights of the conference can read lay papers and press releases at www.acoustics.org under ASA’s Worldwide Press Room. Three special sessions honored the contributions by Jens Blauert, Johan Sundberg, and the late Henning von Gierke. A special ses- sion was also dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC). There were 58 exhibitors that participated in the Exhibition including 52 companies and 6 scientific organizations, one of which was ASA (Fig. 13). In addition to the exhibits and scientific part of the meeting, there were a number of social events, including conference recep- tions and a special concert at the
Fig. 8. Didier Cassereau explaining the computer software.
8 Acoustics Today, October 2008