GD03, Day One, Morning
Woke up just in time to attend the invited talks, and didn’t even have time for breakfast. The first one was by a guy from the Boeing Math group, Tom Grandine, about their efforts in geometry generation, and its role in aircraft design. The talk was very interesting for me as a person not too familiar with the aircraft design, this talk gave a bit of insight on how aircrafts go form design to product. The second talk was by one of the guys behind level sets, Stanley Osher. The talk was a blur, because he was trying to give an overview of his favorite subject by skimming through 3 sets of old presentation slides prepared for different aspects/applications of the level-set idea. Frankly, it was a bit disappointing that an invited speaker didn't prepare a new set of slides for his or her plenary talk.

I found out that I can have breakfast at the Starbucks on the ground floor -- I think that is where I'll go for chow in the morning for the rest of this trip, instead of the expensive breakfast I had yesterday.

After the plenary talks, I met up with Steve in the foyer. He decided to go to the Pike Place Market during the morning Mini Symposium session to pick up Craig's spices. After checking the scheduled topics, I decided to join him. It’s a good day to go because it’s not supposed to rain today. We’ll see.