Saturday, last workshop day - May 17th

Last night, social activities interfered with science as we had a very nice workshop dinner at Restaurant Godthem in Djurgården.

Today instead, the last day was celebrated (during an otherwise rainy day) with a lot of program. The audience reached again 40-45 at maximum (the early morning being an exception). The first part was on computer science/physics -related issues, with three long contributions. First Johan Håstad told us why (eg.) MAX-SAT is so very difficult to approximate (actually you can as well try a random assignment...). Then, Ashish Sabharwal and Alexander Hartmann educated the audience more on why Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) are interesting. Ashish talked about how to sample the number of solutions cleverly, and Alex about analyzing clustering in COL and 3-SAT and its relation to what Local Search does. The structure of the CSP solution (and energy) landscape was also addressed in short talks by Frederico Ricci-Tersenghi, Florent Krzakala, and Lenka Zdeborova.
They all presented very recent results.

Finally, the Saturday was finished with some mixed topic -talks, and with Matteo Marsili discussing How to Be Lucky, or how to park (in Marseille).

Hopefully all participants liked this event, in particular those who came to Stockholm/Nordita only for the workshop and not also for the program.

On the eve of the Nordita program

At this point, the upcoming weeks look interesting. There has been some last minute extra interest concerning both the program and the mid-term workshop on May 15-17. This event will be in particular packed with three full days of program... but, while one should give the participants a chance to work on science, we also will be kept busy with one or two daily talks for the bread-and-butter part of the schedule before and after the workshop.

It should also be acknowledged already, that we have had extra support for PhD students (from Sweden, the Access Foundation, from Finland, the National Graduate School for Materials Physics - which obviously also includes the physics of complex systems...).

The real scientific program will kick-off on Tuesday 6th by a talk from Luca Peliti from Naples. A glance at the rest of the week tells that in addition to "program events" there will also be talks by participants at other occasions and institutions in Stockholm: a welcome sign. Updates of the scientific life will be published here regularly.

Speaking of welcomes on Monday the 5th there will be a welcome event for the people who have reached Nordita already by then.

Now the program is shaping up: the participants' list is more or less ready, and what remains is to set up the daily list of activities. This will happen in April, after we (Mikko Alava and Erik Aurell) get back from the KITPC program in Beijing. Some of the last minute additions are: Luca Peliti (Napoli), Matteo Palassini (Barcelona), and Massimo Vergassola (Paris).

As regards the workshop, scientists who recently have signed up include Bart Selman (Cornell) and Scott Kirkpatrick (MIT, and HUJI). This proves that we do not have only physicists attending, I hope..... the deadline of the workshop is Feb. 29th, so there are still some days to go.

Last news of 2007

Both the program and the workshop have had a number of additions (in the former case Chin-Kun Hu, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan and Mesoon Ha, KAIST). We would like to welcome all.

The program and the workshop are now soliciting participants.

Notice that we offer Grants and they are partly reserved for Nordic and partly for all possible participants. The deadlines are on the actual webpages with details.

I wish everyone a happy 2008!

Some more exciting people to the workshop

The program of the program workshop is developing. At least three new names will be added shortly, Florent Krzakala (ESPCI, Paris), Jeremy Stripling (MIT), and Riccardo Zecchina (ICTP, Torino Polytechnic) are namely coming to Stockholm.