At the end of July I visited Xidian University to be part of the Ph.D. Comittee of Jiafeng Zhang invited by Prof. Zhiwu Li. This defense was to obtain a double title, one from the Xidian University and the other from the Saarland University.

I don't know if every Ph.D. defense in China is like this one (because of the added complexity of being a double title) but it was more or less like this:

• The candidate presented the results
• The chair read the questions of the external reviewers and the candidate replied to these questions
• Then, the chair invited the members of the comittee to ask more questions
• The comittee decided in a private session (as usual). Then, the candidate was informed of the final decision, and the members of the comittee congratulated her
• Finally, some pictures were taken and a there was small party with sweets and so on

You can see some pictures of this defense at Jiafeng Zhang's Ph.D. defense. The photographer was Liang Li.

Previous to this, I was invited to give a talk Evolutionary Computing and Structural Properties of Petri Nets. They were so kind to prepare a big poster:


I presented there some ideas from our last works (Accepted paper: "Computing Minimal Siphons in Petri Net Models of Resource Allocation Systems: An Evolutionary Approach", and Accepted paper: "Using the Incidence Matrix in an Evolutionary Algorithm for Computing Minimal Siphons in Petri Net Models").



You can see some pictures at Talk at Xidian University. The photographer was Liang Li.

During these days Chinese people were very friendly with me and showed us some nice places in Xi'an and invited us to taste really wonderful meeals. Thanks for this really nice experience!
You can see some pictures I took at: Xi'an travel pictures.