Saturday, October 20, 2007

Brief FOCS Update

I went to FOCS for the day of tutorials. Great talks by all of the speakers (Terence Tao, Dan Boneh, and Dan Spielman) -- and it seemed to me like a very large attendance for the tutorials. I understand slides and such will be put on the appropriate FOCS page soon, so rather than give detailed comments, I'll provide a pointer when they're up.

Also, I wanted to give a big thanks to the local arrangements team of Philip Klein, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Claire Mathieu, as well as everyone assisting them, since I know from experience that local arrangements is a thankless job. I found today's setup wonderful. The room at Brown was great -- perfect size, fine acoustics. Lots of food and refreshments were put out, and to save the conference money, it wasn't catered, but the local arrangements team brought stuff in themselves. (I arrived early and saw Anna driving up with a car full of goodies!) That's the kind of extra dedication that helps keep conferences affordable for everyone, at the expense of the personal time of the people who have to make it all run. So thanks again!

The FOCS setup has reminded me that I wanted to do a series of posts on the theme of service, something I'll try to get to this week.

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