The 28th edition of the Estonian Winter School in Computer Science was held in the period 2-5 March in Viinistu, a small fishing village located on the coast of the Gulf of Finland. This edition of the school was organised by Cybernetica AS and the programme/organising committee included
- Peeter Laud (Cybernetica AS),
- Monika Perkmann (Tallinn University of Technology),
- Pille Pullonen-Raudvere (Cybernetica AS),
- Ago-Erik Riet (University of Tartu) and
- Tarmo Uustalu (Reykjavik University and Tallinn University of Technology).
This year's edition of the school featured four courses, each consisting of four hours of lectures and three hours of exercises. Renato Neves (University of Minho, Braga, Portugal) delivered a course on "Reasoning precisely about imprecisions (metric program equialence)". Matej Pavlović (Near One) gave a course on "Distributed consensus, state machine replication and Byzantine fault tolerance". Miklós Simonovits (Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Hungary) spoke about "Extremal graph theory and related areas". Finally, I contributed some lectures on "The equational logic of concurrent processes: Results and proof techniques".
I thoroughly enjoyed taking part in this winter school. It was a great pleasure to learn from the other lecturers and to interact with the young researchers and students, including several BSc ones, who attended the event in a relaxed and idyllic setting. The organisation of the event was perfect and allowed all participants plenty of opportunities to discuss topics related to research, academic life and their studies with the lecturers and the organisers. We also had a lot of fun listening to the humorous presentations delivered at CRAPcon'26, including talks on pets in the wild, the Fibonacci properties of the broccolo romanesco, node equality in graphs, and reasons one should not enrich (in category theory and beyond).
The organisers of the Estonian Winter School deserve the appreciation of the computer science community for their efforts over about 30 years. To my mind, events of this type have a huge positive influence on young computer scientists, some of whom then decide to pursue PhD studies and a research career. Organising the editions of the school for such a long period of time requires a lot of work and this type of contribution to the community is often not sufficiently recognised when evaluating an academic for positions or promotions.
For the little that it might be worth, let me thank the organisers, the other lecturers and all the attendees for a lovely event, which rekindled a little, much-needed optimism in me in very troubled times.
