Today at Dyalog ’14 was a day of Technical Workshops: six half-day sessions and one all-day session were held, and there will be more at the end of the user meeting on Thursday.

JD’s Introduction to DWA workshop

This evening Gitte will informally welcome the attendees before Vibeke introduces the scavenger hunt and Karen and Jason run a traditional English pub quiz so that delegates can get to know each other and the host country a bit more.

Getting Involved

This year we plan to keep you more up to date than ever before with what is happening at the user meeting. Programme updates and supporting materials will be made available on our website. There will be blog posts each day and we are using the Twitter hashtag #dyalog14 on our tweets – we encourage everyone to join in with us whether in Eastbourne or not.

Preparations

For Team Dyalog, the start of the user meeting is the culmination of preparations spanning weeks or even months. There have been some obstacles along the way – not least the fire on the pier, which meant a replacement banquet dinner venue had to be hastily found – but the presentations are ready and everything kicks off in the morning. We are looking forward to a busy but enjoyable week!

Jason repairing fire damaged robots *

Unpacking

Setting up the conference room

No one is saying what these are for

* See this blog post

Tomorrow…

Dyalog ’14 formally begins tomorrow. We expect a busy day commencing with registration and followed by ten presentations in total, starting with a formal welcome from Gitte. As has become the custom, there will be a mixture of presentations from Dyalog Ltd, guests and invited speakers throughout the week. Monday traditionally features Dyalog presentations and this year is no exception – but we will also have Charles Bremner and Heikki Tikanmäki talking about forensic DNA analysis and pension modelling respectively. Two years ago, by popular request, we abandoned the practice of running presentations in parallel (extending the programme by a day to allow this) and all of the presentations will run sequentially again this year.

There are planned evening activities for each of the conference nights. After dinner tomorrow, John Scholes will present his observations on the subject of “distractions” – those who have attended his evening presentations before will know they can be highly entertaining!

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Welcome to the first of several postcards from Dyalog ’14 in Eastbourne. The last Dyalog conference/user meeting held in the United Kingdom was at Horsley near Guildford back in 2003 and we’re looking forward to holding it on what is, for a lot of us, home ground. Eastbourne is a resort on England’s south coast known for its promenade and pier (of which more later!), its hotels, guest houses and, by no means least, its conference centres. As a bonus, we should see some decent seaside weather – we can’t promise the Florida sunshine of Dyalog ’13 but the UK is currently having a much better than average late summer; the weather forecasters say it should continue and that we’re heading for one of the driest Septembers on record so let’s hope they’ve got it right!

All but four Dyalog staff have come to Eastbourne. We’re looking forward to sharing what we’ve been working on, listening to our users’ presentations and meeting attendees old and new – this is set to be the biggest conference we have ever held with 126 registrations in total (two more than it says in the programme due to two last-minute registrations after we went to press!).

Coming Up…

The programme kicks off tomorrow with Technical Workshops all day followed by three and a half days of presentations by Dyalog staff, users and invited guests, finishing on Thursday afternoon with the remaining Technical Workshops. We’ll report on some of the highlights of these presentations over the coming week. We’re making recordings of all the presentations and some of the workshops, and will be putting them all up on the Dyalog website over the coming weeks.

We do, of course, also have our “Viking Challenge” on Wednesday as well as daily evening entertainment, culminating in the banquet on Wednesday night. Originally we had the dining suite at the end of Eastbourne Pier booked for the banquet, but, as you may have seen, Eastbourne Pier suffered a major fire at the end of July and is now closed for rebuilding. Fortunately we have been able to secure The Grand Hotel as an alternate venue, and all is back on track.

All in all we anticipate a very busy – but enjoyable and productive – week and hope to summarise the essence of it here; check back daily for reports of events!

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