In the photo, it is not the saucer section of the USS Enterprise NCC 1701-D that you see, but rather the Evoluon, a building constructed in 1966 in Eindhoven. It consists of a 77-meter diameter prestressed concrete structure whose futuristic shape indeed resembles an alien spaceship landed in the city center.

The Evoluon was the venue for this year's RoboCup Symposium, the 27th edition of the scientific companion conference to the robotic soccer World Championship RoboCup. Interestingly, 20% of the approximately 30 accepted papers for this year's RoboCup Symposium come from RoboCup's Soccer Simulation League.

In the context of our work with our soccer simulation team FRA-UNIted, two papers were produced that we had the opportunity to present at the symposium today. In "Holes and Clashes in Simulated Soccer: When a Real-Time Simulation System Meets Compute-Hungry Agents," we address synchronization problems in server-client-based systems like simulated 2D robotic soccer. And in "The Glee Didn't Last Long: How Continuous Integration Helps Revealing Fundamental Flaws in Team-Play," we combine approaches from Reliability Theory with a novel CI/CD framework that we have released as open-source software. You may have a look into these papers here and here.