Last week I attended the meeting of IFIP Working Group 2.1: Algorithmic Languages and Calculi in Viana do Castelo, Portugal. I think all members and observers agreed that it was a good meeting, with (perhaps overly) abundant food and good company. Thanks in particular to José Nuno Oliveira for organising the meeting and to Peter Höfner for serving as chair of WG2.1 for the last six years.
Because this was my third meeting as an observer, I was eligible to be selected as an ongoing member of the group, and I'm happy to say that I was invited to become a member at the conclusion of this meeting.
I presented some new work my student Rayhana and I did with Rob van Glabbeek, classifying monitorability classes topologically.
This was the sequel of sorts to my prior WG2.1 talk on LTL properties within finite time, which was in turn presenting work from our EXPRESS/SOS paper last year. The topological connection was realised thanks to Nicolas Wu, also a WG2.1 member, who pointed out in the Canberra meeting that the work I was presenting had distinct notes of domain theory. The topological connection was more that of Alpern and Schneider than Scott, but that was the spark that drove this later work, which will hopefully be included in our forthcoming Information and Computation paper.
Views of Spain from the Camarido Beach.The excursion of the meeting included several stops, including two interesting Viana museums, an archaelogical site on the nearby mountaintop, and a memorable trip to Camarido Beach, at the northernmost tip of Portugal, with Spanish Galicia just to the north along the road from Portugal to Santiago de Compostela.
The climb and the Santuario church.After the meeting had formally concluded, Oleg Kiselyov, Fritz Henglein, Matija Pretnar, Thomas Sewell, Ningning Xie and I climbed to Santuario de Santa Luzia. We took the arduous stairs rather than the funicular, as Matija's wife had forbidden him from Portuguese funiculars after the recent Ascensor da Glória derailment, which led to me overdoing it and nearly fainting, but in recompense Matija bought me a beer at the top of the mountain which made it (mostly) worth it!
Hopefully I can make it to the next meeting in Estonia next year!
