I was very pleased to participate in this workshop in honor of the 60th birthday of Peter Glynn. I supervised Peter's undergraduate research thesis at Carleton in 1977-78 and have followed his career since then with great interest. The workshop was excellent. It was a good opportunity to meet with old friends Tom Kurtz and Onno Boxma and to have stimulating discussions with the other participants. Highlights of the workshop were the brilliant talks given by several of Peter's former Ph.D. students at Stanford and a stimulating problem session. Al-in-all it was one of the most enjoyable workshops that I have participated in. As usual the Banff setting was spectacular.

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I have had a number of very interesting scientific conversations with colleagues. There are prospectives for two new collaborations. One joint paper was initially started earlier, but we got fresh ideas during the workshop that allows to finish the paper soon. I talked about job prospectives with two younger colleagues. There were several discussions on problems and prospectives of several journals in the area of applied probability and stochastic networks.

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Mathematically, I was a bit of an outsider at this workshop, but it exposed me to a new area of research, and through meeting new people it is very likely to lead to new collaborations. Also, I raised an Open Problem on the first morning, and by Friday morning Jose Blanchet had come up with a solution, which was very impressive. Doing all of this in the middle of stunning scenery was a bonus!

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From my own perspective, the workshop has helped me by: creating a new research collaboration with Prof Jim Dai; a participant solving an open problem I posed informally; helping me understand a number of recent important developments in our field (multilevel Monte Carlo, and perfect simulation variants thereof); exposing me to a range of open problems in the applied probability sphere. My thanks for the wonderful hospitality and organization at BIRS.

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The BIRS workshop provided me with a great opportunity to establish new contacts in academia. As a junior scholar, I find the experience rewarding in that my current research results were disseminated to several renowned scholars in our research community and received positive feedbacks. Hopefully this would turn to more fruitful research agenda in the future.

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