Go Spurs Go!

I was in Texas in November to attend INFORMS. Precisely, I was in Austin. There were a lot of people: more than 4,000! The hotel was crowded...
Unfortunately, there were only few people attending the 2 sessions about Constraint Programming. I think about 15 people were in the room for each session. However, I found the talks quite interesting and this opinion was share by some other persons. I particularly appreciated the talk given by John Hooker about MDD based solvers. Nevertheless, I think that John should really try to combine some constraints like he started to do with the among constraints instead of claiming that a whole solver can be based on MDD. The use of MDD for combining some constraints sharing only few variables seems to be a very promising idea.
Personnaly, I gave a talk about nurse scheduling, I changed a little bit my CPAIOR talk and it seems that people appreciated it. I also met Ashish Sabharwal who just moved from Cornell to IBM Watson Research Center (near New York city). It seems that some other people are moving there, which has been confirmed by several other persons at IBM. I will investigate more if I have time.

If you want to find more information you can look at Michael Trick's blog where you will find a picture about the Twitters group at Informs (http://mat.tepper.cmu.edu/blog/?p=1258).
On my side, I have also a picture to show. Before, going to Austin I went to San Antonio. I have been really well welcome as you can see on this picture

Everybody can recognize the Spurs because it is written on the Pom-Pom girl dresses...
It was my first NBA game and I really enjoyed it! Tony Parker is a really good player!