The British Colloquium for Theoretical Computer Science (BCTCS) is the nearest British event to EWSCS. The main difference is that BCTCS is mainly contributed talks; at EWSCS the 5 mini-courses took up most of the time, with just 8 student presentations. Making the slides for my introduction to computational game theory took more time than I'd anticipated; probably because previous talks I've done on the topic have been research talks with less emphasis on doing a detailed introduction to the background. The format in which lecturers do 4.5 hours of lectures, seems like a good idea, but requires quite a lot of care on the part of lecturers - if you get it wrong the loss is of course bigger than for just a 1-hour talk.
The students who attended EWSCS seemed to be well-prepared and asked plenty of searching questions. The Russian contingent all came from St Petersburg, probably due to its proximity, also this seems to be something of a tradition. At least 2 of them were undergraduates, who has heard about this event due to being in a club for students whose interest in CS goes beyond the content of their degree course - such an organisation must be a good way to find prospective PhD students; probably better than just looking for students who got good marks, which correlates positively but weakly with interest in pursuing further research.
I came home late on Friday, after passing on the opportunity to visit Tallinn's historic centre; that will have to wait until another trip. On the way back to the airport (via the bus station) there is no hint of this tourist attraction - just a gloomy procession of rust-stained, Soviet-era concrete apartment blocks, going on for mile after mile. (I did not bother to check that these buildings were Soviet-era; indeed, the phrase is essentially a handy label for all the concrete stumps that to this day, continue to go up in all parts of the world. Le Corbusier has a lot to answer for.)
I thank Helger Lipmaa for inviting me to lecture at EWCSC 2009.
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5 comments:
It's a pity that you didn't visit the center of Tallinn and didn't see all that wonderful medieval stuff. You may consider you have a perfect excuse to come to Estonia again. Unfortunately, today's town-planners continue erecting ugly high-rise buildings in the center and periphery, and it certainly ruins city's skyline and breaks some beautiful views. Brodsky wrote: "Le Corbusier and the Luftwaffe have in common that both worked flat out to change the look of Europe: what was forgotten by the Cyclopses in their fury was soberly completed by pencils", and it seems correct.
Well, I will try to come back to see the center. At EWSCS I was given a tourist brochure of Tallinn - to its credit, it has a section on Tallinn's Soviet Legacy, with subsection on Architecture, and a picture of the sort of building I mentioned in the post (so, not just the nice central area!).
In the UK there's also the Midlands Graduate School
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/MGS/
which I've attended in the past and serves a similar purpose I think.
Although, it's firmly on the semantics side. Is that A or B? I can't remember.
Good to meet you in Estonia Paul!
James
It was very nice to meet you indeed - it seemed that you enjoyed this week there. People enjoyed your talks - especially the part that had psychedelic pictures. I think only a few people knew anything about AGT before your lectures, but I hope your lectures were not zero-knowledge. :)
Anyhow - having Russian students is by now a good tradition we would like to continue for a while.
As for Tallinn, the suburbs *really* look ugly. They have been improved during the last 10-15 years, but given enough money they should just be demolished. May be after the recession, eh. On the other hand, the centre is really, really beautiful - I showed some of the good parts to three of the lecturers on Friday.
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