Dagstuhl: Programming Multi-Agent Systems
I vaguely threatened to write up my trip to Schloss Dagstuhl when I posted about visiting Trier. I don't really feel up to an account of even the most interesting talks but I thought a bit of general waffle might not go amiss.
Schloss Dagstuhl is this strange place that accommodates and feeds computer scientists at ridiculously cheap rates at the expense of the German taxplayer. Here's a picture of it from its wikipedia entry which rather coyly refers to its "many sensible arrangements" which presumably means the apparently limitless supply of cheap alcohol and chocolate.
I hopefully managed to persuade at least one person there to implement his PhD project in our system which was good news though I also gave one of the most fraught talks of my career. I started out with 7 slides and 25 minutes. After 45 minutes I was still only on the 4th slide fending off numerous questions while the next speaker kept saying "No, no, carry on I can trim my talk". I felt thoroughly grilled by the end of it though everyone else seemed to think it had gone well.
This picture is of the seminar attendees on the chapel steps. You can just about see my boss in his habitual blue T-shirt hiding behind an umbrella. Also note that there was woman at the seminar who is shorter than I am. She also does model-checking of agent programming languages. What, I wonder, are the odds that the only other person (probably in the world, almost certainly in Europe) building a framework to model check agent programming languages is a woman who is shorter than me!!! Of course I'm not remotely competitive about my height - oh no!.
Schloss Dagstuhl is this strange place that accommodates and feeds computer scientists at ridiculously cheap rates at the expense of the German taxplayer. Here's a picture of it from its wikipedia entry which rather coyly refers to its "many sensible arrangements" which presumably means the apparently limitless supply of cheap alcohol and chocolate.
I hopefully managed to persuade at least one person there to implement his PhD project in our system which was good news though I also gave one of the most fraught talks of my career. I started out with 7 slides and 25 minutes. After 45 minutes I was still only on the 4th slide fending off numerous questions while the next speaker kept saying "No, no, carry on I can trim my talk". I felt thoroughly grilled by the end of it though everyone else seemed to think it had gone well.
This picture is of the seminar attendees on the chapel steps. You can just about see my boss in his habitual blue T-shirt hiding behind an umbrella. Also note that there was woman at the seminar who is shorter than I am. She also does model-checking of agent programming languages. What, I wonder, are the odds that the only other person (probably in the world, almost certainly in Europe) building a framework to model check agent programming languages is a woman who is shorter than me!!! Of course I'm not remotely competitive about my height - oh no!.