purplecat

This is the last travel picspam for a while I promise. I was there to deliver a lecture on Verifying Autonomous Ethical Systems to Matryoshka's Machine Ethics class.

( Pictures under the cut )

More photos of Delft

( Under the Cut )

I have written about Schloss Dagstuhl before. I do rather like the place, so seized another opportunity to go when one presented itself. I will not bore you all with the details of Verifying and Testing Multi-Agent Systems. I think the most interesting aspects, for me, were getting a better handle on some of the logics for reasoning about multi-agent systems, and getting a better look at some of the other model-checkers out there. There was also an interesting session on devising good examples for the specification and verification of multi-agent systems and, with luck, there may be some concrete outcomes from that.

However I will talk about the hike. ( The Hike )

At the end of march I went to a conference in Tallinn, Estonia. It was actually a really good conference and I came away with lots of thoughts though I'm not really intending to blog about them since they are along the lines of "more efficient ways to generate Büchi Automata" which I suspect won't mean much to my flist. Though there was an interesting and more generally accessible talk about load balancing in the German national grid with a side order on getting more trains onto a single European train track which I may give an overview of at some point (*stares dubiously at list of "things it might be interesting to blog about" which has grow scarily long of late*)

Anyway, I actually think my boss was a little bemused by my sudden enthusiasm for foreign travel when this came up. Our group was approached by one of the attached workshops and asked if anyone would like to give a talk and he rather dubiously passed the question on and asked if anyone was interested in going. Normally I'm not terribly excited at the prospect of spending a week away from home, but I'd seen pictures of Tallinn and it looked terribly pretty.

( I was not disappointed. Gratuitously long Picspam under the cut )

I didn't take many photos when I was in Japan. Sapporo is a tourist city, but it's tourism is based around it's winter ski slopes and focused on the internal market. Visually, it felt to me very much like visiting a North American city, just on a slightly more compact scale which actually made walking from place to place practical. But largely there were just a lot of big modern buildings.

( For the sake of completeness though, here is the view from my hotel window )

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.

( waffle )