York

A couple of weeks ago I made yet another excursion for work purposes. This time it wasn't quite so exotic - sunny York - for the PATAT conference. I had a talk on the last day of this one and if you're really interested you can see my slides here - it's about planes so there's at least some nice pictures!

The conference is about the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling, though it's much more broadly about any problems related to scheduling, including transportation stuff. It's actually the first academic conference I'd ever heard of, back in 2004 when I was doing my honours project on genetic algorithms for timetabling - which for some reason has recently been cited a couple of times. Most of the group from Stirling was there, along with some other very good people, so it was very good for the old networking.

Obviously much of my time was spent doing this.

Somewhat excitingly though, one of the conference dinners was at the National Rail Museum. Excellent! This is me with a replica of Stephenson's Rocket, one of the most famous early steam engines, 

Dinner in a train shed.

The view out of my hotel window - a bit greener than Beijing!

Some Yorkish stuff.

The River Ouse, viewed from a place that took two hours to bring lunch.

The hotel was right next to York Racecourse - here's the hotel garden set up for the conference's opening barbecue.