And Hooray for IWOCA -- International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms! Originally the "Australasian" Workshop when we founded it in 1987 at Curtin University in Western Australia, made "International" in 2006, the 2024 event will be held in Ischia, Italy.

And finally, a big Hooray for the demise of Covid! After a couple of years of reduced activity, things got back to normal in 2023. PhD student Holly Koponen presented our research at the Prague Stringology Conference (PSC) in August. Then in December MSc (soon to be PhD) student Amin Kashef presented more of it to the COCOA conference in Hawaii. Meanwhile, PhD student Hamed Hasibi finished Part I of his doctoral programme in record time and is currently investigating machine learning applications in computational biology. By mid-2024 all three of these hard-working students should be well-established in their PhD research.

I was recently appointed to the Editorial Board of the Institute ot Combinatorics & Its Applications; while I continue on the Board of Directors of both IWOCA and PSC. Meanwhile, in 2024 I published five papers, including a major survey of string covering, while my h-index -- "the largest number h such h publications have at least h citations" -- rose to 34.