And tomorrow I head home

Dagstuhl group photo, Theory of EAs, Jan 2008

All good things must come to an end, and our week at Dagstuhl ends tomorrow after lunch. Above is yesterday’s group picture (I’m in yellow near the front) just before the traditional Wednesday hike (below), which was wet and misty but still an enjoyable few hours out in the world.

Sweeping into the mist

I gave a talk this morning which (I think) went well, especially since I didn’t know I was going to be giving a talk until Tuesday afternoon! There was certainly a lot of good discussion and people came up with tons of suggestions and ideas, which is what I really love about presenting at Dagstuhl. I started with something quite fun, which I’ll post here later. Most of the talks have used computer slides (PowerPoint or some more sensible alternative like LaTeX/Beamer), but Jon Rowe did a great blackboard talk on Tuesday (pictured below).

Reaching for an explanation

I was greatly inspired and did almost all of mine on the boards as well. I had four slides at the beginning that really needed to be slides, and then I did the bulk on the boards, and came back to a fifth slide at the end.

Tomorrow there are talks before lunch, including a talk/discussion thing that Riccardo is doing that I’m sure I’ll be roped into in some mysterious way. Then we eat, and it’s a taxi out to the Frankfurt Hahn airport for our flight back to the UK!

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Right in the thick of it

Right in the thick of it

We all arrive at Dagstuhl on Sunday night for the week’s workshop. After a long day of traveling we enjoy some of Dagstuhl’s exceptional food, meet with folks, and catch up.

Above is the conversation during dinner tonight. It’s not the sharpest photo I’ve ever taken, but I think it captures the spirit of the room quite nicely.

And then we (at least quite a few of us) get to work. The photo below was taken at 9:30pm (probably 2.5 hours after the previous one), and there were quite a few people in this lab at the time. And there’s another lab elsewhere in the facility, and the library, and people’s rooms. I’m sure that lots of folks were also hanging out in the coffee room or playing pool, but there were a lot of people working on a Sunday night as well.

It helps if you enjoy your work, and most of these folks are extraordinarily interested in what they’re studying.

Encapsulating knowledge


While I’m at Dagstuhl this year I’m going to try (amidst all the “real” work) to capture something of what the workshop is like and, more generally, what it is to do (computer) science. This is hard because it’s not flashy high-action bull-riding kind of work, but it’s important, significant work and deserves to be documented. I’m just going to have work harder at it.

I’m also probably going to take more people pictures than I would be naturally inclined to. If anyone finds them self in a photo here and objects, let me know and I’d be happy to remove it.

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