Great encounters

This week I attended the “Thinking Architecturally” workshop organised at the Computer Lab in Cambridge by the EINS EU NOE project. The workshop aimed at bringing together people from various disciplines that talked about designing and creating architectures within their domain.
The attendance list was very impressive and the viewpoint presentations brought in lots of discussions (some in agreement, some in disagreement). The discussions generated showed the differences between various communities with regard to what aspects should be part of an Internet architecture. My favourite presentations were by Aaron Sloman and John Doyle, because they were very thought-provoking (at least for me!). It was quite an amazing experience for me to meet Aaron Sloman during this week, as I’ve known some of his work for such a long time. I first saw his CogAff schema in 2000 and it is one of my favourite representation of various levels of reasoning. On top of that, he is such a nice person to talk to and listen to. Every time he said something I was in awe 🙂 This material includes what he presented during the workshop. John Doyle talked about biological structures as an inspiration for architectural thinking.