A few weeks ago, Paolo (my supervisor) had introduced me to the EWD (Dijkstra) notes. While I was aware of Dijkstra as a computer scientist, he had written out notes to colleagues about many different things. One type of note he distributed was trip reports where he would write about visits he would make. I quite like the idea and thought why not make my own trip reports. This will be the first one I write and I’ll see if I write more in the future.

Sunday 17th - Travel Newcastle to Antwerp

After a 3-hour journey from Newcastle, I had arrived in London. A few friends and family had wanted to meet me, but I decided to do the trip in one go rather than break it across multiple days. This meant I simply left King’s Cross and went into the St. Pacreas to get through to the terminal and wait for the Eurostar. During the wait in the terminal, I began making my presentation in LaTeX since I was presenting on the Friday. I already had the structure in mind and a previous presentation made, but I was transferring it into a nice LaTeX Beamer template. After some edits, it was time to board and make my way to Belgium.

The travel on the Eurostar is always relaxing, I had spent the time mainly listening to a podcast that helped the 2-hour journey whizz by. After getting off, I managed to find the local train to Antwerp and was there after another 50 minutes. The hotel room I was staying in was very spacious (Premier Suites Plus Antwerp). I went to bed shortly after dinner, I planned on getting a lot of sleep since I had been busy for most of September.

Dinner: Takumi Ramen Kitchen.

Monday 18th - Preparation and Reception

Not much to say on Monday. A fire alarm had disturbed my sleep (fortunately there was no fire), but I still managed to get around 11 hours of sleep. I spent most of the day preparing the presentation and went through a dry-run with Paolo. There were some changes to be made, but I could do that across the other evenings.

In the evening, I had attended the CONFEST Reception. Another attendee (Cece from Imperial in London) and I had gotten lost but we managed to work out where we needed to go. There I met Zhen Zhang, Masaki Wabe and Joshua J. (one of Zhen’s students). It was a good opportunity to get to know them and learn about their experiences in academia. I was trying to remember where I had heard of Zhen before and it turns out he is on the committee of VMCAI 2024 (where I recently submitted a paper to).

After the reception, I went around the centre of Antwerp where I saw the cathedral (De Kathedraal) and grabbed some pizza for dinner before relaxing in my room and turning in for the night.

Lunch: EXKi; Dinner: Piazzo.

Tuesday 19th - CONFEST Day 1

The first few talks were on using neural networks for verification. These days it seems that machine learning is being applied to almost everything (not sure what that says about the state of research). I decided to explore the city. If you are in Antwerp, definitely check out St. Anne’s Tunnel. It’s an old tunnel that goes underneath the river allowing pedestrians to cross the river. It has quite a 20th century design and was really interesting walk through.

During the day, there was an interesting talk on extending the mu-calculus with data, which allows you to not only set properties but get answers out, e.g., how many a actions are taken. It seems that there are several mu-calculus extensions like this, but this is the first one I’ve seen. I wonder if these data extended logics find much usage though. At the end of the day, got to have some dinner with Sadegh, Paulius Stankaitis and Kostiatyn Potomkin (all affiliated with Newcastle University).

Cafe: Me and My Monkey; Lunch: Holy Guacamoly; Dinner: Appadocia.

Wednesday 20th & Thursday 21st - CONFEST Day 2 & 3

Today was the start of QEST. Before that, there was an invited talk by Prof. Joost-Pieters Katoen. It was inspiring to watch. The talk featured a mixture of theory and applications. Formal verification in practice is not something I see all that much but very interesting to hear about.

It seems that the application of formal methods to the quantum stack is being picked up by members of the formal methods community. During the boat tour, I had spoken with Zhen at length about quantum as some of his colleagues were looking it. I forwarded him some of Paolo’s work for his colleagues and I am hopeful they will reach back to us with questions. Part of Jaco van de Pol’s invited talk featured some work on quantum circuits. I also had the opportunity to speak with Christian Schilling who was involved in the development of symQV.

On Thursday, Sadegh, Paulius and Kostiatyn had given organised and presented a session in memory of Sergiy Bogomolov (who had passed previously this year). It was enlightening to learn about his work and life and I wish I got to know him while he was at Newcastle. My conodolences go out to his family.

Wednesday Lunch: Conference provided; Dinner: Horta - Conference dinner.

Thursday Lunch: Conference provided; Dinner: Taj Mahal Indian Kitchen.

Friday 22nd - CONFEST Day 4

I had spent my evenings preparing my talk and today was the day that I was presenting it. I think My talk had gone well; I was a bit nervous leading up to it, but thought that overall I presented well. I even had a few people come up and ask me questions about it afterwards, which is a good sign. The last dinner was pleasant as I got to talk and network with a few people from QEST.

Overall the trip was a good time. I got to learn a bit about the Formal Verification community and it is interesting to see how closely connected I am from people within the community. I think it is also good that there was some discussion of quantum computing and the need for formal verification to be applied to it.

Lunch: Conference provided; Dinner: Beer Central.