Hari Sundaram is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It was a pleasure meeting Hari whom I know for so many years now. It was a pleasure meeting him in his new environment at UIUC and also hear about his passion on enabling cooperative behavior adoption on a large scale and shaping social network behavior. Hari also introduced me to his colleagues and Phd students of the departments. Helen Wauck is a PhD student in the field of HCI who is working on video games to teach different aspects of spatial reasoning skills. Her advisor is Wai-tat Fu, a professor in the Department of Computer Science who is heading the Cognitive Computations and Social Dynamics lab. It was a nice surprise that Wai-Tat will be spending his coming sabbatical in spring 2016 actually in the neighborhood of Oldenburg. He will be a guest scholar at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), a foundation of the federal states of Bremen and Lower Saxony and the city of Delmenhorst and work together with my colleague Christian Freksa at the University of Bremen. It will be a pleasure to invite Wai-Tat also to Oldenburg and advise on the ongoing research project SOCIAL (facilitate spontaneous and informal communication in spatially distributed groups) funded by the DFG which Christian Freksa and I am currently running. It was also a pleasure to meet Karrie Karahalios who leads the Social Spaces group and her students John Lee and Hidy Kong. They provided my an overview of a very exciting recent research projects – looking forward to see it published.
