Thoughts on Keynotes

I’ve been helping a conference or two lately on the topic of invited speakers and keynotes.
I enjoy conferences where there are no keynotes and no parallel sessions (often because I can’t often tell my interest in a paper presentation from reading a conference abstract) but I also enjoy an inspiring speech.

Some of my favourites have been:

Rob Cook, Pixar Animation Studios, SIGGRAPH2008, Singapore
Kent R. Week, VAST 2005, Pisa
Genevieve Bell, Digital Humanities 2015, Sydney

I’ve seen more famous people speak, philosopher Daniel Dennett, architect John Andrews, a couple of Noble Prize winners (3, I think, astronomer Brian Schmidt was genuinely awe-inspiring), and Apple’s Steve Jobs (most incredible business presenter/seller ever). But the first three mentioned really set the mood, key and tone of the conference.

So what is a keynote speaker for?

To inspire and prepare attendees for the future
To survey and inform attendees of with what has been done (personal projects or overview of field, startling or unusual or little known discoveries, inventions, crises and projects)
To critically examine..

In other words, what has been done (and why), what must or should be done, what could or will be done..

I seldom hear the why, or the must be done or the (what we think) will be done..

Often keynotes are invited because

They are famous and will lend gravitas to the conference
The program chair wants to meet them and bathe in their reflected glory
They are famous for being keynote speakers..

I know of 2 or 3 who are invited so often to keynote, they give ever more and more polished versions of their original talk.
Rather than just an individual’s projects, in general I think I’d like to hear more from #3 and also from younger, fresher researchers, but too often what really happens differs from what I’d like to see happens…

Some hopefully useful links