Professor Mike Kirby, Editor of Trends in Urology and Men's Health, picks some interesting recent papers highlights the ‘take-home’ messages.

Non-functional requirements significantly affect and determine the quality of software systems. In this paper it is shown how non-functional requirements are modelled in MIKE, an approach to the development of knowledge-based systems. A semi-formal hypermedia-based model is used to describe the results of the elicitation and interpretation of non-functional requirements and their relationships....

This is the first in a series of lectures given by Mike Hopkins at the Talbot workshop in April of 2007. For this talk, Mike was asked to talk about “the tmf theorem” and to explain some of the motivation and intuition behind the stacky language. As those who have heard him speak know, Mike is a very entertaining lecturer. Sadly, these notes reflect only the mathematical content of his talks, l...

To each connected component in the space of semisimple representations from the orbifold fundamental group of the base orbifold of a Seifert fibered homology 3-sphere into the Lie group U(2, 1), we associate a real number called the “orbifold Toledo invariant.” Using the theory of Higgs bundles, we explicitly compute all values this invariant takes on.