First All Hands Meeting Palma de Mallorca
The Sophocles consortium met at the Institute of Applied Computing & Community Code of the Universitat de les Illes Balears in Palma de Mallorca from 10th to 12th June for its first All Hands Meeting. Around twenty representatives from the partners in the project attended the meeting. The consortium was pleased to be joined by the two members of its External Advisory Board: Dr Emanuela Merelli of the TOPDRIM project, and Dr Primoz Skraba of the TOPOSYS project. The main objective of the meeting was to take stock of the current results in the Work Packages, to look at where and how they fit in the Sophocles work plan, and to make a planning for the next months.
On the first day the whole consortium attended a plenary session, with presentations by all the Work Packages on the progress of their work and objectives for the next six months. On the next two days the meeting continued with separate Work Package meetings to discuss the progress of the research. On the second day, break-out sessions were self-organized in order to brainstorm about possible collaboration projects between various partners. This resulted in a list of over half a dozen concrete project descriptions that the partners will pursue in the coming time. The Project Management Committee also met to discuss the managerial aspects of the project, including the planning of meetings and activities for the next year. During the morning of the third day, small groups sat together and ironed out the last details.
In the plenary session, the members of the External Advisory Board gave an introductory presentation to the consortium about their projects, and pointed out potential areas for collaborations and promising lines for research between their projects and Sophocles, for example around topological information and topological hypothesis on the origin of phase transitions. These collaborations will continue at the Satellite Meeting on Information Processing in Complex Networks at ECCS 2013.
The next Sophocles All Hands Meeting will take place from 16th-18th December at Warsaw University of Technology in Warsaw, Poland.