Saturday, February 23, 2008

New Zealand (NZIMA)

For the last week, I've been at a workshop in New Zealand, sponsored by the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications. They're having a programme in algorithms, including this workshop, and they invited me to give a couple of talks. (I'll be giving versions of my "Brief History of Power Laws" talk and my "Bloom Filters Survey" talk.)

OK, OK, I know, this violates my "avoid-travel" rule. Occasionally, I find myself suckered into travel for various reasons. In this case, the managed to time the workshop over my kids' winter break, in the middle of Boston winter (and the end of New Zealand summer), while it's winter. (My wife, also a native Californian, does not enjoy winter.) Besides the weather motivation, I've never been to New Zealand, and don't see a lot of future opportunities. So why not?

I'm happy to say we've had a really nice time in New Zealand, and I encourage visitors. Let me advertise that there will be a similar workshop sometime at the end of 2008 here as well. Perhaps if you're interested you might contact Mark Wilson, who will also leave comments with pointers and information. And the rest of the week I'll have some notes/ideas/open problems from the week in New Zealand.

1 comment:

Mark Wilson said...

Michael -it was great that you could come. The survey talks, and the advice session for grad students, were very good.

At a meeting on Thursday the participants decided to try to develop a more formally organized community in the area of algorithms in NZ. We intend to have a smaller meeting in June-July, with maybe 2 invited speakers. Anyone reading this blog who wants to volunteer will be considered!



Mark Wilson
Dept of CS, University of Auckland