Wednesday, January 24, 2007

SOFSEM - Day 4

Now we have snow....finally :) ...even a lot of it. It was snowing all day long, roads in Czech Republic and also in southern Germany were closed. Also Prague Airport was closed until the afternoon. But, I guess as far as I remember that are the more typical weather conditions for SOFSEM.
Anyway, the day started with a keynote of Tom Henziger about 'Games, Time, and Probability: Graph Models for System Design and Analysis'. He addressed three major sources of system complexity: concurrency, real time, and uncertainty. Concurrency can be modelled as a multi-player game representing a reactive system with potential collaborators and adversaries. Real time requires the system to combine discrete state changes as well as continous state evolution, while state changes - for uncertainty - also have to be modelled in a probabilistic way.
Unfortunately some of the presenters of the following contributed papers did not show up. Thus, the conference program was subject to several changes. In the afternoon the posters of the student research forum each had a short 5 minute presentation, followed by a poster exhibition and a lot of discussions. In the end, the participants should give a vote for the best poster presentation. My choice - which of course is completely subjective - was the poster of of Henning Fernau and Daniel Raible on 'Alliances in Graphs: a Complexity-Theoretic Study'.
In the late evening I was trying to look for my car, which was buried under the snow at the parking lot. Due to the wind the snow around the parking lot (and my car) was piled up almost half a meter...which made me think about the road conditions and the plan of driving home the next day....