The second day of the UCNC conference started with a keynote by Yukiko Yamauchi on "Distributed computation by mobile robots". Unfortunately she couldn't be here in person, but one thing Covid has enabled is remote presentations. Lots of interesting ideas about what shape patterns swarms of robots can make given certain constraints.
The other keynote was by Eric Goles, on "Unconventional CA models". These included models based on inspiration from fungi, with controllable "pores" controlling the flow of information, and models for getting consensus with local rules.
The rest of the day was taken up by a Reaction Systems workshop, and a couple of contributed papers. I confess I missed some of this, as a colleague and I went out to put some flesh on a research proposal that we had started collaborating on over Zoom. Covid might have enabled much more collaboration over Zoom, but nothing beats sitting down together over a piece of paper and brainstorming in person.
Off now to the conference dinner.
Great set of updates, and this sounds like a highly interesting conference. Speaking of interesting, these posts from early March have just now appeared in my browser (I check your blog approximately weekly, and it's a newly created browser tab each time). Almost as if you're posting from the Oort Cloud or something. Now that I know your blog is so very asycnhronous, it adds an extra dose of anticipation about what I'll see each time I visit!
ReplyDeleteYes, I'm a bit behind, rather than far away :-)
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