WCSMO12 is over

WCSMO 12 link is just over.

After the previous once (for me) in Lisbon, Orlando and Sydney, Braunschweig sounds unexcitedly. It was just a 4 hours drive with the car. We were a total of 8 people with 7 from Michael Singl's group.

However, it turned out to be a quite nice and successful conference. To my personal impression the quality of the talks was better than in Sydney. There were about 550 people with up to 7 parallel sessions. Session hopping done very much but also possible due to close rooms and good time management of the chairs. However the sessions were in my eyes also organized in a way that you need session hopping. Sometimes the "big" names were in rooms to small for them.

There was for my interest to much overlapping of parallel tasks I was interested. E.g. Niels Aaage's and Rasmus' talk parallel to my own session. I wish there were less parallel sessions but I don't known how to achieve this, maybe minisymposia would help.

I was not that happy about the poster session. It was parallel to three session and as I had my talk there I could only be at the poster session in the break before. The poster session was nicely prominent in Orlando but also in Sydney I was not that happy with the poster session. I personally often feel that posters are often treated as less valuable whereas I indeed often prefer them against talks.

Beside this the organization was quite well done. Long breaks with enough time for talking, cake and beverages all the time. The crew was excellent! The welcome reception was the best I ever had: Good food, a lot to drink and a lot of space and room to talk and meet. Wetter was very good, we could open the windows for fresh air most of the time.

Compared to ECCOMAS 2016 in Crete there was not really something big new. The overhang constraints from Matthijs Langelaar evolved. The laminate interpretations from Ole's group based on Olivier Pantz' ideas was nice, something like my old streamline stuff done right and rigorous :) However I personal think, it needs to become 3D and when the issues there are solved, I'll be very impressed! The talk I liked most was actually Dan's the state-of-the-art talk. I could not attend Kurt Maute's talk, but my colleagues were quite impressed.