GSO - goooone

So, the Guided Self-Organisation (GSO-2008) workshop has come and gone.
It was a really interesting week, with a key focus on information-theoretical aspects of self-organisation, plus particular theme days on computational neuroscience and adaptive hardware and robotics.

We also did some nice socialising, with a couple of BBQs (at my supervisor's place and mine), and a trip to the Blue Mountains (west of Sydney) where we did the Evans Lookout walk (at least I think that's the one we did). I found the bushwalk quite challenging, as I was still recovering from a broken ankle some 3 months earlier (I did it while putting the rubbish bins out, the night I came home from ALifeXI!). I never thought one could get such a sense of accomplishment from walking. It was a really interesting day though: obviously we saw some wonderful scenery and the company was great, but we also had the strange experience of (the briefest amount of) snow in Australia, barely two weeks before summer ...

Anyway, for a few weeks before and after the conference, we had several of the participants as guests at our lab. This was a very stimulating time, and I had the good fortune to spend many productive hours with them discussing information dynamics, causal effect, measures of complexity, etc etc. There are several interesting threads of investigation underway ...

Bring on GSO-2009!