Every year the rivalry between the two Australian states Queensland and New South Wales reaches its boiling point around the State of Origin: three competitive matches of rugby league football between the two states. (For the people from outside Australia: this is actually a different sport from your "normal" rugby which is played by the rest of the world.) So, the organizers must have thought that there is no better time to organize a joint workshop between the two states on the border of the two states (Kingsclff, NSW) during these matches. To exemplify the rivalry, it is said that Queensland cabdrivers charge an additional $10 for trips to NSW, which was a bit awkward for the workshop participants since the closest airport to Kingscliff is actually in Queensland. At the time of the workshop, Queensland won the last 8(!) series in a row; however, NSW won the first match of the 2014 series. So, both states (and academics from these states) were very optimistic and confident in a victory. In short, the perfect circumstances for a good workshop with ample opportunities for heated debates.

The set-up of this small, four-day workshop entitled "Challenges arising in singularly perturbed dynamical systems" was, in my opinion, very interesting and extremely good, and I would like to advise more organizers of workshops to follow this idea. On the first day, all students had five minutes to present their e-poster (a 1 page PDF), followed by 10 to 15 minutes of discussion. The next days, the academics had 15 minutes to present their work in five slides (it is interesting to note that the students are extremely good in counting to one, but that the academics are actually very bad in counting to five), followed by half an hour of intense discussion. The academics were strongly encouraged to present ongoing, unfinished work and to mainly focus on the open problems. Moreover, there was a three-hour break every day to continue, or start up, collaborative research projects, or to elaborate on some of the discussions from before.

This clever set-up made sure that everybody knew all the students, and their projects, from day one, and it was therefore very easy to engage them in discussions. Also, by discussing unfinished, ongoing work, the discussion sessions were very lively (in contrast to some discussion sessions I have seen at other workshops) and often had to be stopped since the 45 minutes had passed instantly. For example, the discussion on Melnikov integrals and Fenichel Theory after Sanjeeva Balasuryia's talk on "Travelling wavespeeds in PDES singularly perturbed by time-delay" was extremely interesting and (unfortunately) had to be stopped at one point. Another aspect that stood out during this workshop was the level of the students' posters: they all put a lot of effort into them and their designs, resourcefulness and innovativeness were extremely well thought of and clever. Even Lionel Richie made his appearance during two (!) of the presentations.

Group picture from not-so-sunny Kingscliff, NSW.

ps. NSW won the series this year, but after 8 years of losing this can only be seen as a sportive gesture of Queensland. Go Maroons!