"buy-buy roma"

strangely enough, that was actually (no joke) the name of all the duty-free stores in the rome airport.

the 'swarm robotics workshop (srw)' was actually really nice. it was just after the 'simulation of adaptive behavior (sab)' conference. the only real downside was, as predicted, it was a working weekend (a long one at that) and despite being in rome, i didn't really have any free time to do anything, so it might as well have been in poughkeepsie. but i do have to say that it was still kinda fun, albeit in an extremely intellectually fatiguing way.

getting there was more eventful than necessary. to summarize, i left the house before 8:00am, and didn't get to the conference center until after 6:00pm (more than 10 hours)---when i drove back from rome after our vacation with the family two years ago, it took me 9 hours. i thought airplanes were supposed to go faster?

anyway, the plane was two hours late leaving, by the time i got to the train station in the airport and bought a ticket, i missed the train into the city by about 30 seconds, and had to wait half an hour for the next one. when i got into rome proper, the directions i had said that one could either walk 20 minutes, or take the metro. now, you all know i'm almost always partial to walking, but i figured, i'm in a hurry, i'll take the metro... so 20 minutes later, i had found the metro station, bought a ticket, and was still on the platform waiting for it to come... but i was committed by that point, so i got on, got off, re-surfaced, and started asking for directions. multiple iterations later, i had actually been directed all the way around the outside of the campus in the wrong direction, and after 45 [more] minutes of walking, i got there just as they were ending the last session (i had been trying to get there to see the last session, since alcherio was chairing and pierre was presenting).

thus began the whirlwind weekend of i'm-not-sure-why-we're-in-rome-because-we're-spending-all-our-time-inside-working-anyway.

the presentations were mostly quite good and interesting, though there were a couple that were either badly executed, or not adequately literature-searched, which made me squirm a little bit feeling bad for those people. at least i can be extremely grateful it wasn't me, though. i got to spend a decent amount of time talking with spring, the girl from upenn (a student of vijay kumar), who was cool. they're trying to do top-down modeling of swarm systems, whereas alcherio has typically taken the bottom up approach. they've got some good ideas, and i was certainly impressed, but it seems they have some pretty major hurdles to handle before it can really be said to actually work (which i suppose is good, since otherwise it would basically put us out of business). also got to spend some time with alan winfield's grad students and postdoc, who were fun to be around as well. the only problem with this whole picture is just the usual when you are surrounded by people who are brilliant, you can't help but feeling stupid...

i gave my presentation on sunday morning, and it actually went really well. i was pleased with myself (doesn't happen very often), and several people told me afterwards that they thought i had done a great job, so that made me feel good. alcherio said it was "okay" and "much, much better than the practice run we did"---that's probably about the best compliment one could have gotten out of him---though he was irritated that i skipped the video in order to stay within the time constraints. i guess he thought i should have had it playing in the background while taking questions.

monday we went to CNR to visit stefano nolfi and his group. again, great people, but it was really quite striking how i didn't expect there to be such a marked difference between the facilities we have here, and what they have there. it was like everything was ~30 years old, and with half the funding. i almost felt a little sorry for them, and a twinge of guilty for all the advantages we have here.

on the way back, i ducked into the duty free shop at the airport to grab a bottle of the limoncello, which we had been served after dinner one of the previous nights. i guess i'm kinda getting into this whole collecting semi-exotic liquors thing.