Science in Summer time

If everything goes as planned this year I am attending two Summer Schools.

The first one, the International Computer Vision Summer School 2008 , will be hosted in Sicily, Italy in 14-19 July. The program seems to be quite good and it will cover topics like object detection, tracking or 3D reconstruction, among others. There's also a reading group on "how to conduct a literature review and discover the context of an idea". The challenge is to see how far back in the past one can track the origins of a scientific idea. For example, the AdaBoost is a well known machine learning meta-algorithm, in which a sequence of classifiers is progressively trained focusing on the instances misclassified by previous classifiers. The set of classifiers is then combined by a weighted average. It was introduced by Freund and Schapire in 1996. This is easy to track, the question however is: can you find the same or similar core idea, or intution, somewhere else back in the past? Possibly from a different domain?
It's gonna be fun!

The second one is the 10th Machine Learning Summer School, 1-15 September, Ile de Re, France. The program is also quite nice, but I still don't have the confirmation I can attend it.
I would be specially interested in Rich Sutton's lecture on "Reinforcement Learning and Knowledge Representation" although hearing about Active Learning, Bayesian Learning, Clustering, Kernel Methods, etc. also sounds quite appealing.

Looking forward to science in summer time!