As promised, here are the chronicles of my German visit.
The visit started with a flight from Lisbon to Saarbrucken via Palma de Mallorca. It’s been quite a while since I’ve flown without frequent flyer benefits: No lounge, no special check-in. It was quite a shock to sit on the uncomfortable terminal chairs with no Internet access, but I managed. The flights themselves were surprisingly comfortable. Due to the fact I was flying on a low-cost carrier, I could book seat 1A, which is a regular economy seat, just in the front of the plane and with much more legroom. As luck would have it 1B was vacant on both flights, and on the second one 1C was vacant too, leaving me with a whole row to myself. Onboard service included a sandwich and free soft and hot drinks. All in all, a very positive experience, comparable even to “Europe Select” (business class) on KLM.
Between the flights, I ate at KFC at PMI, was surprised to see they offered Coke and not Pepsi, and French Fries instead of Mashed Potatoes, but the chicken was more or less the same. They also talked Spanish, but that I’m used to from KFC in the US too.
Saarbruecken airport is very small, serving mostly general aviation. It has exactly two gates and two baggage belts, and the passengers walk from the airstairs to the terminal. No border control was needed, and in less than half an hour from landing I was outside and picked up.
Later that night came the shock: The vacation apartment we were staying at did not have basic necessities: No Internet access, and even no phone! This left me without any form of communication with the outside world. In the following days, my outside communications were strictly monitored and limited, and thus no blog updates, among other things.
What we did do in the following days was play lots of boardgames I brought, and go touring in several towns in Germany and beyond.
The first day was all spent playing boardgames and resting. The next day we went to the northern Mosel valley and visited the tourist town of Cochem and Eltz Castle. This was not the original plan, but the road to the southern Mosel valley was closed for bicycles only for a “bicycle day”. I could not help noticing the contrast between that and what happened recently in San Francisco, where the city was sued by car owners for a plan to dedicate more bicycle lanes.
On the third day we went to Luxembourg, capital of Luxembourg. On the way we passed the city of Schengen, which is known for the Schengen treaty for open borders in Europe. This leads to the anomaly that Luxembourg is in Schengen, while Schengen is in Luxembourg. The city itself houses an impressive castle and “casemates” — ancient city fortifications. Another useful feature is the free municipal WiFi all over the city and the impressive views.
The fourth day was spent in the city of Heidelberg, known as the home of the first university in Germany, and well, another castle. The castle houses the largest wine barrel in the world, and a museum of German pharmacies.
The last day was spent packing and playing boardgames, and the day after was spent flying back. The route was STR-AMS-MSP-SFO. We left home at 6am towards Stuttgart airport, where I was upgraded to business class on the two short segments. The flights were comfortable, but the illness I began developing in Lisbon has intensified, and I spent the flights coughing and aching, especially the last one. The first class flight attendant was very nice and repeatedly offered me more tea, until we finally arrived at the airport. Finally I took the shuttle home and went to sleep.
At home, I checked my newly repaired laptop and some boardgames I’ve ordered and made a doctor’s appointment, where I’m headed right now.
May 23rd, 2008 at 23:21
Posted by
epsalon |
Health, Germany |
2 comments
Yesterday I have given my planned talk at the Dagstuhl seminar about Selection Games and Deterministic Lotteries ( it’s always good to have an oxymoron in your titles). The talk went well and people were quite interested, given that many of the reviewers in the AAMAS conference where I submitted this paper were in the audience, I think my chances are good.
However, what I really wanted to talk about are the talks I gave today. Today we had a rump session, which is a special session where anyone can give 5 minute talks on any topic he or she wishes. Out of six talks, I gave two. One of the talks was about my work-in-progress regarding the manipulation of academic conferences.
The second talk of mine was humorous, and talked about manipulating the seating arrangements in Dagstuhl. Recall that researchers are seated randomly for meals in order to facilitate communication. My talk was a joke about this issue. If you are interested, take a look at the talk slides, posted exclusively on my blog. The issues of Manipulation, Bribery and Control are common considerations in the world of voting, all photos were taken during the seminar with my iPAQ camera.
Now I’m back at my brother’s house until Sunday when I am going to fly FRA-EWR-SFO and return to Stanford.
October 26th, 2007 at 18:10
Posted by
epsalon |
Funny Stuff, Academia, Germany |
2 comments
I am having a good time at Dagstuhl Seminar 07431 on Computational Issues in Social Choice. Almost all talks are very interesting and I had some good conversations with some of the people here.
On Tuesday there was an open discussion about complexity of voting. While participating in this discussion, it became clear to me that there is something very wrong with most of the existing works on complexity of manipulating elections, and only very few papers dealt with the problem in the approach I consider more correct.
[If you are not interested in details about my research, skip the next two paragraphs]
It turned out that the principal authors of two of these papers are here at the seminar. I spent the night* between Tuesday and Wednesday thinking about this problem, and on Wednesday morning I had a developed idea. After telling Vince about it, he reminded me of the general Gibbard theorem, a corollary of which removes any hope of pursuing my crypto idea.
So, I let go of the crypto direction, and instead considered voting under partial information. There was limited work done on the subject, and I had some good ideas on how to model the problem. On Wednesday after lunch I got Vince interested, and together we managed to prove two interesting impossibility results and have some very important observations regarding this problem. As it seems, this work is on the way to become a paper.
I am very happy to be able to write a joint paper with Vince Conitzer. I have known him since the first conference I attended in my PhD, which, as luck may have it, was a Dagstuhl seminar. Since then, I have met him in every conference I have attended. He has published over 40 papers, even though he has just recently finished his PhD, some of them with groundbreaking results.
* The reason I am working nights is my partial adaptation to jet lag, I go to sleep after dinner at 19:00 and wake up at about 3:00, I get enough sleep and don’t miss any talks, even though I don’t really live in the right timezone.
October 25th, 2007 at 07:45
Posted by
epsalon |
Academia, Germany |
2 comments
(that is, departure to Germany for those of you who don’t know German)
Yes, I’m flying again, this today my itinerary is SFO-IAH-AMS-FRA (that’s San Francisco, Houston, Amsterdam, Frankfurt), and then a train to Saarbruecken. The plan is to fly to Germany for a conference and visit my brother on the way. I’m going to be there for 10 days. I’m all packed (well, except my laptop) and in an hour I’ll be boarding the shuttle to the airport to start my journey.
In order to qualify for platinum I need about 3000 more miles. If I do not get any other trip funded this year, I’m considering doing a mileage run to West Palm Beach or to Boston. In the case of Boston, I might want to stay there for up to a week. Honolulu is also an option, although more expensive and with less miles.
October 18th, 2007 at 17:50
Posted by
epsalon |
Frequent Flyer, Germany |
one comment
Last week I flew back home with no luggage, with only a handbag. This was due to the fact that I left my luggage at my brother’s house in Saarbrücken. I will pick the luggage up when I return to Dagstuhl (and my brother) in October.
However, then I will be flying from the US and back, and thus will be able to carry the luggage left at my brother’s house in addition to whatever luggage I fly with to the US.
So, how do you fly handbag only? I checked in for my flights the day before and printed out an electronic boarding pass. I then used this boarding pass to go directly to the gate and board the flight without even passing the checking counters. Even my Silver status was mentioned on the boarding pass, so I got to use priority boarding as well.
In the Amsterdam - Tel Aviv leg I was assigned a whole row, but shortly before departure the flight attendants had to move two children who sat near the emergency exit to my row.
Upon landing at Ben Gurion airport, I head directly outside and wait for a shared taxi that (after three hours) brought me home.
July 16th, 2007 at 13:08
Posted by
epsalon |
Frequent Flyer, Germany, Travel |
3 comments
