I think the greatest benefit of conferences is to get exposed to diverse, unusual ideas, and to talk to people you can't usually meet.
I'll be at #NeurIPS2018 starting Tuesday night. If you're working on an approach to program synthesis that's off the beaten path, let's chat.
Program synthesis in general is off the beaten path. But some approaches are more popular than others. I'm most interested in the stuff I haven't heard about before.