On one side, the facilities provided by BIRS and the Banff Center are excellent; living there is so easy and confortable that you can keep your mind occupied with the scientific problems and, at the same time, you forget you are working. This is an extremely rewarding experience that you bring to all of us and will not be forgotten at all. The information provided along the whole process is very clear and all is prepared to arrive at Banff and work efficiently. The lodging quality is excellent, as well as the food in the restaurant, and the leisure activities. I have been recently serving as deputy director of the CRM in Barcelona (www.crm.cat), so I can imagine the quantity of time and material resources you have to put to reach this level of efficiency. I must confess that, even though I am proud of the services of CRM to the community, I feel a "healthy envy" of the way BIRS runs. So, let me give my congratulations in this sense. On the other hand, I appreciate very much the job made by Susanne Ditlevsen, Priscilla Greenwood and Andre Longtin in organizing this workshop. They were able to put together a group of excellent persons, with common interests but non-coincident backgrounds, and with a sincere desire to understand each other's work. More personally speaking, I come from dynamical systems theory and I've been working mainly on deterministic treatment of brain dynamics with an increasing interest in statistics and stochastic processes. In this conference, I have felt how my research caught the attention of other participants as they kept asking me about many aspects related also to their research. At the end, I came back home with a long list of stimulating suggestions as well as a group of colleagues which whom I can eventually interact in the future. I wish I could say the same of every meeting I'm attending! Summing up, I think it has been one of the best meetings I have ever attended and I am very grateful to BIRS for this opportunity.

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The outstanding combination of focused research talks, long breaks, and meals with colleagues is an ideal combination for facilitating discussion and generating new research ideas. I can count about five different projects I conceived of while at the BIRS workshop last week. A very important aspect of these meetings is that they are small and focused, so my mind remains in the same ballpark of topics throughout the week. Everyone's research is well connected. The impact of stochasticity on synchronization and network dynamics is a central focus of my own research, so it was great to find colleagues to talk to about this from around the globe.

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