Review of the WCNDT
Rolf Diederichs
The World Conference and Exhibition on NDT was held from 30. Aug until 3. Sep 2004 in Montreal Canada. The Conference and Exhibition was visited by about 2600 People from more than 50 countries. 500 Talks and 170 Posters have been presented in 28 Sessions from Monday afternoon until Friday noon.
Shake Hands Everybody
The WCNDT opening ceremony was held on Monday morning without any cultural spectacle. Welcome talks were made by Douglas Whitely, Douglas Marshall, and Peter Brady the president of the CINDT. Peter Brady closed his talk by encouraging the guests for social contacts: "shake hands with your neighbors, that is one of the most important reasons why we are here". This found strong applause and people began to move to shake hands. Of course this and other important things cannot be replaced by Internet communication, also clearly shown that Rolf Diederichs from NDT.net needs such conferences too. On the other hand the Internet was with us during the whole conference , email from Room to Room, even visitors participated parallel in the NDT.net forum via the excellent, but usually occupied, Internet Garden in the exhibition hall. During the opening ceremony some ICNDT Awards were handled out. The ICNDT Young Achiever Award was received by Anish Kumar. We congratulate Philippe Rubbers, the runner-up, for his nomination. Philippe published excellent simulation software in recent NDT issues.
Services in general good
A lot of stuff around from Events International was always helpful. In contrast a strange computerized Messaging System, without charming face, was obviously running with a few bugs in a Beta version. A good idea, but could be improved if the system would be simplified and reliable, as any other NDT System should be. Very funny that a handwritten paper was necessary to explain: "this is not an Internet Access.". Some attendees were not very satisfied with the food quality and the drink quantity during the exhibition welcome party, but the gala dinner later was certainly well provided with ample drink for all. Accompanying persons to the exhibition welcome reception paid C$ 25 for empty tables, but got their money back without problems. Luckily those people were invited to the GE party, which offered a large choice of beverages and drinks.
NDT Talks - A mix of NDT
Attendance at the talks varied a lot, usually between 10 to 100 people in the room. A common criticism of the talks or papers was their quality, at least a part of it, but also a lot excellent papers have been presented. This issue had already been raised after the WCNDT 2004 in Roma when it was promised that this time to increase quality and not quantity of the papers. Is the author fee the reason for that? Also visitors complained that talks would often run over the allotted time. Some mechanism to indicate to the author the remaining time could be very useful. Unfortunately some obviously attractive sessions, like phased arrays, have been held in the smallest rooms. On the other hand in big, but empty rooms, sessions like material characterization and a few others, were held. Some authors used advanced presentation techniques like in power point embedded movies or Ed Ginzel showed a complete movie of ultrasonic wave visualization [127].
Somebody had the excellent idea: "Next WCNDT should also show posters". This was obviously not the only one who noticed the posters too late. For some opinions, posters were located too far away in the exhibition. Just the booth of exhibitor Wolfram Deutsch was happy to get more attention near the poster walls.
Coffee break in the Exhibition
Companies of 30 countries presented at 150 booths NDT services and products. Not a lot US companies, but relative many from France, India and East Europe. Rumor between some exhibition stuff: "too long, NDT inside". But 3 days are for visitors of the exhibition, just parallel or in breaks of sessions, a minimum need. One company felt to be in a wrong movie: "next time we should go to the Plastic Show".
How was the CD-ROM Proceedings?
The CD-Proceedings was not very well accepted. Some of the complaints we could verify:
 | The complete interface was build in a to small fixed screen size 800x600 and not possible to resize or move as window on the screen
| | Missed the Adobe Acrobat toolbar, e.g. magnifier features and other things.
| | Table of contents showed titles but no authors.
| | What use is an alphabetical list of titles?
| | The papers often to high compressed images and difficult to recognize details. Images layers have been lost during conversion.
| | No AND or OR search option, just simple sring match without whole word match. Search results in too small frame without any details or number of docs matched
| | Search results for text showed just file names and path instead of titles or other more usueful details
| | Search results in titles showed matched titles but without clear separation between each.
| | | For what purpose is a search in topics of 28 session names? This was obviously a place for search in Keywords.
| | All papers did not refer in the header to the conference
| | The Program crashed several times during searching
| | Some papers showed error messages and not able to open
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As a result, NDT.net now has difficulties to bring this CD content in a user friendly Internet version. Conferences of such a high operation budget should be able to spend a little bit more money for CD-Proceedings. We heard authors opinion: The proceedings is something very important, which is the only thing left after the conference closed its doors. Also more valuable is to bring the CD content to the Internet, instead of people cannot find or has no access to the CD anymore. During the conference Rolf Diederichs addressed in talks to the ICNDT, the Continent federations and country societies: Do not write your society missions - live your society missions!
Even the CD was not from the beginning in the spirit of the Internet compatible designed, nevertheless many thanks CINDE for their excellent cooperation, supporting with files and permission, for enable us to present this 16th WCNDT CD-Proceedings on the Internet.
Our Societies
As usual during the conference an ICNDT meeting took place. After a Fifty-Fifty election between Douglas Marschall and Guiseppe Nardoni , Nardoni resigned so that now D. Marschall is now the new ICNDT President as well the secretary moves from AIPNDE Italy to CINDE in Canada. Guiseppe Nardoni holds from now the chair of the PGPC (operation committee) and Mike Farley (BINDT) continues as ICNDT secretary chair. Elected as members of the PGPC have been, Rainer Link from Germany and Tony Sonneveld from Australia. The Delegates of more than 40 NDT Societies approved Lapland, Malaysia, Moldavia and Singapore as new ICNDT member.
Outlook to forthcoming Conferences
Douglas Whitely expressed his surprise that more than 200 people had interest in the closing ceremony. This is in our country unusual, he said. Perhaps everybody was interested in the presentations of future most important NDT events. Nice presentations of the locations have been presented, which obviously will attract many German's Professors for a journey on governments costs (NDT.net saves budgets!). Rainer Link invited to ECNDT 2006 and promised more exhibition space after all booths have been sold out. Impressive also a movie of the APCNDT 2006 in New Zealand at the Auckland convention center. Cesar Belinco invited to the PACNDT 2007 in Argentina by singing the famous argentine tango. The 17th WCNDT will take place 2008 in China Shanghai and in a very early stage South Africa invited to the 18th WCNDT 2008. Finally forthcoming NDT Conferences and Exhibitions in Russia have been announced by its delegate.
| A while ago a little bit Forum Discussion - You can still ad your comment
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A beautiful city with nice architecture
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