Tonight I went to see my sister in law, Osnat Kaydar perform the lead female role in the cantata Camina Burana by Carl Orff. I am not a big classical music fan (to say the least), but I enjoyed the show very much.
It turns out that the opening and closing movement of the piece called “O Fortuna” is very well-known from movie trailers and many other uses in popular culture. Here it is for your listening enjoyment:
This piece is actually a 1936 adaptation of a medieval collection of poems by the same name. The text is almost entirely in Latin, which means I understood it just as well any other in the audience. The performance was amazing and I couldn’t get the “O fortuna” out of my head for some time afterwards.
After the concert, we went to eat at a good steak restaurant in town, and then back to sleep. I have packed my luggage, which I will leave here until I return in October. Tomorrow I’m going to fly home with a handbag only.
* By the way, as I said, this was not an opera but a cantata, but I chose to bend the title a bit.
Today I have left Schloß Dagstuhl on my way to visit my brother, Ronen Altman Kaydar, who lives in Saarbrücken.
I arrived by taxi all the way from Dagstuhl. There were two other passengers in the taxi who were en route to Paris by the new TGV train. As we are all game theorists, we split the fare unevenly using the Nash Bargaining solution (yes, it’s the same Nash), so I paid €9 while the two others split the remaining €48 bill evenly.
I’ll now answer the question I was asked several times during the conference: What is my brother doing in this unknown corner of Germany? Well, the short answer is: translating English tour guides to Hebrew.
However, this has nothing to do with the reason for him being in Germany. He’s there because his wife, Osnat Kaydar, is an Opera singer, and studies at an opera school here. Tomorrow I am going to attend one of her concerts, so stay tuned.
Today after lunch there was a break from conference sessions. Conference participants were encouraged to participate in an excursion to an old ironworks, where iron ore and coal is converted into pig iron, which is the basis for the manufacture of steel.
In the tour, which took place outdoors in the rain, we saw the various steps in the production of steel. Our guide took her work seriously, while we joked about how hard is it to work in the “industry”.
It turns out that parts of the old ironworks were converted into exhibition halls. Today, there is an exhibition titled “Genius I” about the inventions of man from prehistory until today. It begins with an exhibit of prominent inventors and inventions. Some are reasonable such as the Wheel and Galileo Galilei, but some were more German-centric, such as Beer, and several German inventors.
The rest of the exhibition was very similar to any old science museum. I was not very impressed. As our time was limited, we had to leave quite early, so I didn’t see much more of the exhibition.
Photos were shot at the ironworks tour, but I cannot publish those online. I will get them later in the conference.
First day of the Dagstuhl seminar is now over. This is a good opportunity to tell you more about this unique place.
The idea of Dagstuhl seminars is to bring top computer scientists in a particular field from around the world and have them communicate with each other and do research. This communication is promoted by several means: First, all participants stay in the same building with hotel-style accommodations. Further, there is a coffee room, game rooms, a piano room and more informal activities to allow people to communicate. However, the most direct effort to promote communication is the random seating during lunch. The idea is to force people to talk with people outside their own narrow field of research.
Today I also gave my talk titled “An Axiomatic Approach to Personalized Ranking Systems“. Several people gave me compliments about my talk and many asked questions both during and after the talk. Also, it turned out that we are not the only ones mining eBay for reputation data, which means we might be able to get the data from someone else instead of gathering it ourselves.
At dinner I was seated with several people I know, and one person from Stanford who I didn’t know before. We had a nice conversation, and we have then retired to our rooms. There are no formal plans for the evening, so I plan to go online and maybe look around the premises here at Dagsuthl. All in all, I like it here.
Special Update from Amsterdam Schipol Airport… I got upgraded to business class (”Europe Select”) on my flight to Amsterdam because the flight was overbooked and Economy was full, so I got to feel KLM shorthaul business class service. The seats are standard Economy seats, but the service is improved. The food is served with real utensils and plates, and every passenger gets a personal video player with a selection of movies (I saw “300″), high quality earphones, and a kit with earplugs and eyeshades (among other stuff).
However, the two best things about “Europe Select” are the fact that the center seat is always free, and the fact that they clear trash and trays from your seat much faster than in Economy, several times during the flight. And the last useful perk is lounge access, which I am using right now to write this blog post.
Now I need to explain why there’s a model house in this post. Well, that’s another benefit of KLM Business class. You get one of these collectible model houses for free. Not very useful, but serves as an icon for this post…
Today after lunch there was a break from conference sessions. Conference participants were encouraged to participate in an excursion to an 
