About 40 people turned up for this small workshop in a beautiful town in Germany. Most of them were from Europe.
The lectures were in a spacious classroom. Speakers from outside Dresden spoke for an hour. There were also presentations by students and faculty from Dresden, these lasted half an hour. Between talks there were large gaps during which you could buttonhole the speaker, replenish yourself with coffee and snacks (always available on the house), or just look up your email.
Since the workshop was quite specialized, everybody understood everybody else and there was a feeling of being in one's own community. For lunch we all trooped off to the Mensa, and a workshop dinner was arranged at a German wine-house. After the workshop, we all went to a Lebanese restaurant to unwind.
Three or four talks were on MSC (Message Sequence Chart) languages,
on which there has been a rash of papers lately. MSCs are a representation
of a kind of poset of a fixed width 
: this stands for a system
with communicating agents. MSC languages are thus a generalization
of the usual languages over strings, and the talks presented work on
automata, algorithms and logic related to them.
(Contact the editor of this newsletter for the latest gossip on the subject.)
There were three talks on algorithmic issues. I liked especially Paul Gastin's talk Yet another LTL to automata translator where he carefully analyzed the Vardi-Wolper construction to see how it could be performed efficiently.
Most of the local speakers talked on logic, reflecting perhaps
the interest of the Mathematics department which hosted the workshop.
Wolfgang Thomas from Aachen gave a talk on Saharon Shelah's decidability
of the monadic theory of 
, which does not even deserve
a proof in his paper on the monadic theory of order!
It was a small cozy meeting, and I spent an enjoyable time talking shop with the other participants. Unfortunately that meant I had no time for sightseeing. That will have to wait for another trip to Dresden.