What happens in Snowbird stays in Snowbird

I am flying tomorrow morning to Salt Lake City and then taking ground transportation to Snowbird for the 2007 SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems. This conference, which occurs every odd year at the end of May, is my favorite conference scientifically because it has what I consider the optimal level of subject specificity (in my main subject!) and size (about 500-800 people). I've gone to this conference three times before -- I sadly had to miss the 2005 one because of the trifecta of a conference in Taiwan the week before, moving to LA the week after, and not having any money to attend in the first place (any one of the three would have prevented my attendance by itself) -- and I know a ton of the people attending it. Among the attendees this time are two friends from graduate school who I haven't seen since I left Cornell.

I have co-organized a two-part minisymposium on complex networks. The first part is on community detection and the second part is on dynamical systems on networks. One of our speakers, Aaron Clauset (whose blog you can reach via the menu bar on the left) typically summarizes conferences and minisymposia he attends, so I'll plan on linking to those specific posts if and when they are available.

Oh, I forgot to mention this before: Today is the five-year anniversary of the official awarding of my Ph.D. I celebrated the day with pirates. (I'll write a post about that later, along with the other three movies about which I need to post. I already am going to get much less sleep tonight than I want.)