Participant Testimonials
The workshop was very good. It helps me in my current researches allowing new collaborations with researchers from the SAT community. It gives me new insights and new ideas for my current research domain.
I find this particular kind of workshop very important and interesting. It purposely invited researchers from two disparate but quite related disciplines. It was very informative and stimulating to hear about the research conducted by our peers. Many thanks, once again, to BIRS, for allowing this special workshop to take place and a special thank you to the workshop organizers!
The workshop was an exciting and optimal mix of researchers from theory and practise. During the workshop I met with a number of previous, current, and what I hope will be future collaborators. One collaboration during the workshop led already to a paper, submitted to SAT'14. The workshop was definitely an excellent opportunity to get in contact with many researchers from the more applied side, whom I did not know before well.
The workshop was really inspiring in many regards, particularly it really helped bringing together the proof complexity and SAT solving community. It even lead to a nice joined paper with two other participants, which without the workshop would not have happened.
The talks at the workshop were very useful, offering deeper insights than would be possible at a conference. I embarked on possibly two new projects, while concerning my own projects I was able to start possible collaborations with at least three different groups. So I consider the workshop as very successful. On my own behalf, and on behalf of the two research communities involved.
My participation to this BIRS workshop had a very tangible outcome: while discussing with other participants, we discovered that we worked separately on a similar subject so we decided to team up to submit a paper to the next SAT conference (SAT14). I met during the workshop some people that I usually do not see or meet during conferences. It gave me another point of view of our research topic. I would say that the organization is close to perfect. I got a great time during the workshop, and felt home during the week. I could hardly believe that such a great place could exist. I am looking forward my next opportunity to attend a workshop in Banff.
The workshop was very useful in bringing together the complexity theorists with the practitioners to benefit future research in both domains. The organizers did an excellent job in putting together an agenda that enabled in-depth discussion on topics across the theory and practice spectrum. The discussions have sparked some new research ideas that I am exploring. In addition to meeting people who I had known of, but not met before, I met a few potential postdocs during the workshop that I will be in touch with.
Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
The workshop was a rewarding experience. Well-planned and offering the possibility for interaction with many colleagues. BIRS is ideal for these kind of events.
That was quite an interesting experience. The research I am doing is highly theoretical (mathematical), and the workshop was a healthy mixture of practically-inclined complexity theorists and theoretically-inclined people from the SAT solving community. I was really impressed by the fact that understanding of the enormous challenges faced by this interdisciplinary area is quite similar, at least in some prominent circles within both communities, and I will try to get some students interested.
This was an extremely successful workshop that brought together two groups that typically do not interact. I believe it has created a dynamic that will foster future collaboration between members of the two groups. We should repeat this. The informal setting at BIRS and the extensive "face time" throughout the week (talks, open discussion evening sessions, meals, hike, etc.) made it easy for participants to engage in unexpected conversations. I certainly left with a new idea and am pursuing it with two other participants!
EECS/CSE, University of Michigan
This was a great workshop, where theorists and practictioners of Satisfiability solving got to meet each other, and explain their most recent results and open problems to each other. It was the most successful "bridging" workshop that I've attended so far. I've learned a lot about the practice of Satisfiability solving, and have found a number of interesting and well-motivated theoretical problems to keep me occupied in the near future!
From my point of view the workshop was very successful. It brought together people from two communities -the theoreticians and the more practical researchers- working in the area of satisfiability and the result was that we all were pushed out of our comfort zone and were exposed to many results and methods we were not familiar with. This for sure will influence my research in the future. The logistics, facilities and hospitality were all excellent.
I found the workshop most stimulating, and I was able to re-establish some old contacts with the SAT-solving community. In particular, I had some fruitful interactions with my old friend John Franco that may lead to some new research on the complexity of resolution. I've had to put this research on the back burner for now, but hope to come back to it soon. The combination of people from both the theoretical and practical side of the SAT community was an excellent aspect of the workshop.
The workshop I attended, Theoretical Foundations of Applied SAT Solving, exposed me in depth to material that I only knew about peripherally, and led to several new insights and new research ideas. I met and talked to several new people in some depth about their research. The facilities and staff at BIRS were the best I ever experienced at a professional meeting.
Computer Science, SOE-3, University of California Santa Cruz
