MISTA Conference: Almost There

The MISTA conference is almost upon us.

It was an early start this morning (3am) in order to get to Dublin on the 06:35 flight out of East Midlands Airport. We were actually in the hotel by 09:00 and, thankfully, they had rooms ready so it was not too bad.

We spent the day getting things ready, as far as we could. The real work will start tomorrow and it looks like being a long day. I think we'll open the registration desk at 07:30 and we'll return from the Guinness Storehouse at around midnight.

In between that, we have a Plenary Talk by Moshe Dror ("‘Strong’-‘Weak’ Precedence in Scheduling: Extended Order Implications"), followed by 36 papers, split into nine sessions (the full program can be downloaded from here).

For me (and this is a personal viewpoint; not talking as the conference chair) the highlight is the Sports Scheduling session as this is a particular interest of mine, as you'll see from my previous blog postings. The papers in this session are:

• Mathematical Modeling for Maximising Gate Receipt Problem, Abdul-Hamid N.H., Kendall G. and Sagir M.
• A Heuristic for Minimizing Weighted Carry-Over Effects in Round Robin Tournaments, Guedes A.C.B. and Ribeiro C.C.
• Soccer Schedules in Europe: An Overview, Goossens D.R. and Spieksma F.C.R.
• Round-Robin Sports Scheduling from a Graph Colouring Perspective: A Case Study in Rugby Union Scheduling, Lewis R. and Thompson J.

... but there are many other excellent papers also being presented throughout the day and your preferences will depend largely on your research interests.