This summer the Vaud School for Engineering and Business (better known by its French acronym, HEIG VD) is hosting ten students from San Jose State, ten from CSU Long Beach, and ten from Arizona State. These students are joined by 30 Swiss students. For the next three weeks they will be taking intensive courses in subjects ranging from Bioinformatics to Internet Security. My course, Artificial Societies, doesn't begin until tomorrow, but I interrupted my stay in Italy to shoot up to Lausanne to check on my "kids". They all arrived and were safely tucked away in their dorms. I'm not sure to what extent I should feel responsible for them. There are other professors from San Jose State who are here, and most of the "kids" are graduate students. Still, I felt a pang of guilt
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