Saturday, July 12, 2008

MSFP 2008

I was invited by Conor McBride to give a talk MSFP 2008 in Reykjavik. I've put the slides online here. While rehearsing I wrote a 'script' that I've put here. That's not actually what I said but I felt I needed to write something out beforehand just so I could make sure I had an appropriate amount of material. Apologies for the silly chatty style in a written document but that's the sort of thing that came to mind while sitting in a hotel room. I got to meet in person a bunch of people whose papers I'd read including Thorsten Altenkirch, Tarmo Uustalu and Jeremy Gibbons.

I had an opportunity to explore around Reykjavik so I also put some photos online, including a terrible one of Conor and Tarmo Uustalu (sorry!). By curious coincidence I bumped into, and got to hang out with, an old work colleague as well as a friend of the person who sits one office down from me at work, and Eben Moglen. Small world.

7 comments:

  1. Your slide link and your script link are the same.

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  2. The script link is to text in MacRoman, with CRs as line separators.

    recode mac/CR..utf8 makes it much more readable on a standard unix system.

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  3. Some days I hate computers. Even writing a simple text file can go wrong.

    I'd recode that text file but for a small hitch: mac.com won't let me at that file any more! Probably another glitch in their conversion to "mobile me".

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  4. Dan Piponi:

    That is an absolutely gorgeous presentation!

    Clear, just deep enough, accessible, nicely illustrated, flowing.

    I've emailed the URL to some computing friends who want to learn more Math, and vice versa.

    I've printed out some color hardcopies for people I know who are teaching Math from a CS perspective (including my B.S. Math, B.S. Computer Science son who entered Law school at age 18, and is doing telecom consulting software during this summer).

    Now, if you can convince ILM to make an animated version...

    -- Prof. Jonathan Vos Post

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  5. Dan,

    Thank you for your talk, I very much enjoyed it. It is a pity we couldn't get you a spot on TV though up here in Iceland :/

    Anyways, my regards to Ýmir (we were undergrads at the same time) and for the curious, here are some more photos from ICALP'08 and the affiliated workshops.

    cheers,
    Arnar

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  6. Hi Arnar,

    I was a bit annoyed about the TV thing. I was supposed to be around at a certain time on my last day to meet up with a TV crew but they decided not to turn up after all. I really wanted to spend that day climbing up Esja which Ýmir had recommended to me. As it was, I had just an hour to attempt to run up and down it. As you can imagine, I didn't get too close to the summit :-( Still, what I did see was really beautiful.

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  7. The TV people had agreed on an interview but didn't show up? If so, that sucks.. to put it politely. I'll surely write some emails to express my opinion of that.

    In any case, if you are ever back in Iceland and I'm around, I hereby offer you personally to take you (and Ýmir if he's around) on a 4x4 trip to the highlands for some real hiking - after you do Esjan of course :)

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