This year’s ICS has been in Tucson, AZ. I have served on the program committee and also contributed two papers (one with Marc Snir and the other one with the folks from IU) to the conference. I also co-chaired a workshop with Kamil Iskra. So I had tons of reasons to go there — I wasn’t very thrilled about the location (isn’t Arizona a boring desert, eh?). And actually, it’s not too easy to get to Tucson, it was a 21 hour travel from Zurich *uff*.
Well, I was very surprised! The hotel was just amazing and the landscape even more. I would have never believed that such large cacti exist! I mean – wow! And they’re hundreds of years old. The pool was also amazing, during the day it was full of “tourists” and at night, many computer scientists accumulated around (and in) it :-). It was really nice!
The conference was amazingly well organized. Actually, this was one of the best (if not *the* best) conference I visited since a long time! Congratulations Dave!
Here are some pictures:
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- The hotel entrance
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- Some called me the cactus hugger!
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- I just like them!
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- The pool area 🙂
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- The pool, really nice (beware of the cacti though).
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- A flowering Agave plant, I have never seen this before – somewhat nice but also means death!
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- A blooming cactus!
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- Cacti all over, don’t stumble ;-).
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- A panorama picture of the Tucson valley (credits go to Marc-Andre).
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- There are many funny cactus trees in Arizona. I made the mistake of touching one … bad.
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- A Russian plane engine – I am wondering how this got to Arizona!
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- An American fighterplane, we ate right next to it.
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- And as I thought it couldn’t get any better, they had candy in the break!!!
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- A nuclear warhead – uhuh
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- View of the fighterplane’s cockpit.
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- This blackhawk can travel at Mach 3! Very impressive.
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- The blackhawk’s back.
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- Me sitting on a tire of a huge transport plane.
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- An old army plane :).
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- The ICS social event – impressive!
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- An helicopter in the plane museum 🙂
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- Air force one.