Paolo blog: Ramblings on Web2.0, Trust, Reputation, Recommender Systems, Social Software, Free Software, ICT4D and much more

The Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) at the University of Trento has 70 open PhD positions in the ICT area, almost all of them covered by scholarship.
The deadline for applications is April 20, 2010, before 12 noon, local time.

The Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science is one of the leading and faster-growing research institutions, characterized by a young and international faculty and by a large, international student population. Indicators for scientific production put the department among the very top in Europe. The successful candidate will therefore have the opportunity to work in a dynamic and exciting environment. Trento is a vibrant city with a beautifully preserved historic center, consistently ranked at the top for quality of life in Italy. It offers a variety of cultural and sports opportunities all year around, as well as excellent food and wine.

The Dalai Lama will be in Trento Tuesday November 17th! He will participate to a discussion panel about “Autonomies for Tibet” at Auditorium Santa Chiara, Trento (14.30 - 16.30). The event is part of the 2 days Conference “Regional Self-Government, Cultural Identity and Multinational Integration: Comparative Experiences for Tibet“
(via TrentoBlog and TrentoWiki)

Below the program of the event (in Italian)
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Experiments, demonstrations, performances, meetings, exhibitions, guided tours, open workshops and a party to learn all about the world of science.
On September 25, 2009 Trento will be animated by “The Researchers’ night”, an event sponsored by the European Commission and organized by Fondazione Bruno Kessler (where I work) in collaboration with the Istituto Agrario S. Michele all’Adige, the University of Trento, Trentino Sviluppo, the Institute for evaluative research on public policies (IRVAPP), the Municipality of Trento and the Autonomous Province of Trento.

Check the Program and the video on Youtube.
The night will end up with a party and I’m sure you will not miss the opportunity to dance with a researcher! ;)

Children and adults will have the opportunity to understand science by experiencing its day-to-day practices, by frequenting the spaces and places where research is carried out and by coming into contact with its machinery and equipment, but above all by talking to those directly involved. The public participating will be actively involved in hands-on experiments, in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, using also an accessible wording also for non scientists . Each of the venues for the day’s events will plan a “European corner”, providing information on Europe and European interventions in favour of researchers and research.

Through offering the public at large and specifically young people the opportunity to directly get in touch with researchers in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere, the Researchers’ Night project not only allows the participants to better understand the input of research in economic growth, employment and competition and in their dally lives, but also offers a unique occasion to discover the “human face” of researchers. While discovering the fascinating aspects of the job, the visitors will also share with researchers their hopes, dreams, hobbies, concerns …and perceive them as “ordinary people”.

In the following the program but you better check the Program on the FBK web site.

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Since one year together with my colleague napo, I started and lead a research group in FBK, called SoNet. Our research focus is studying Web2.0 and social networking. You can have a look at our SoNet blog if you are interested (still a bit under construction …)

Well, there is now a great opportunity for post-doc positions in our group here in Trento, Italy.
Find information at http://www.uniricerca.provincia.tn.it/bandi_ricerca_en.asp . If you have any question about the position, please contact me!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the deadline is Monday September 14th, 2009.!

The opportunity
* incoming: funding of individual research projects, both “post-doc” and “team”, promoted by *Italian and foreign researchers* who will carry out the research activity inside Trento province;
* re-integration: funding of individual research projects, both “post-doc” and “team”, promoted by researchers who have been carrying out *research activity in a foreign country for at least three years* and aimed at their possible definitive return to Trentino.

What is SoNet
So Net is a research group inside FBK (Fondazione Bruno Kessler) research institute. FBK is located in Trento, north-east of Italy, and counts more than 350 researchers in a variety of areas, such as Information Technologies, Materials and Microsystems, and Humanities.
SoNet’s research focus is Social Networking and its impacts: more info at http://sonet.fbk.eu

Research in Trentino, Italy
Trentino is the right place in Italy for research. It hosts a large number of research labs from environmental studies to high-tech technologies. The Province of Trento allocates several resources such as infrastructure, real estate and funds to encourage research and innovation. Many institutes, both public and private, local, national and international have established their research units in Trento and Rovereto. Trentino is located in north-east Italy in a charming area of mountains and lakes.

Please forward this message to anybody who might be interested.

See you soon in Trento!

It is once again time for Trento Festival of Economics!!! The fourth edition of the Festival of Economics will animate the city of Trento from 29 May to 1 June.
Economists, legal experts, entrepreneurs, managers, politicians, sociologists and journalists will come together to publicly debate a central issue for our future: how to conciliate identity and globalisation in a time of crisis.

Economists of indisputable prestige coming from the best universities in the world will help us to clarify our ideas. They include two winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics. The first to participate in the Trento Festival will be George Akerlof, who will explain how important decisions are often inspired by “animal spirits” and how these instincts represent one of the causes of the current recession, with a sudden collapse in trust, a factor which governments will undoubtedly have to take into account. The second economist, James Heckman, will help us to understand how economics and psychology are the key to understanding our identity and personality.

It is possible to follow the Festival of Economics live on the Web TV!
And if you are coming to Trento you can do it with carpooling (search for a ride or offer a ride to Trento. At the OtherEconomy square there will be also a stand of Jungo!, a dynamic carpooling system that we are testing in Trento!
Ah, and I’m going to host someone I totally don’t know via couchsurfing! So, if you are coming to Trento for the festival contact me, I probably can host you as well!
I think carpooling and couchsurfing are two good examples of an economic system that is finally going to change … for the better! Good! I see you around in Trento!

In the following a copy and paste the program of the festival. But you can also download it as a single pdf file (program).

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Got an Iphone recently so sometime I wonder through the tons of applications made for the iPhone and often they are very unexpected and crazy.

By the way, today my mind got the “Wow, the iphone is the perfect tool for dynamic carpooling, being GPS-enabled!” (dynamic carpooling being an old interest of mine)

Of course there are already some applications for iPhone for carpooling: Avego and Carticipate seem the most advanced. What is amazing of iphone for carpooling is that you don’t have to enter your common routes by hand but have your iphone do all the work for you.

The app works by tracking a user’s driving habits and then matching them up with people looking for rides. It’s kinda like Match.com for potential serial killers and would be victims. Using the GPS-enabled iPhone, the app will track common routes the user takes. The app then notifies the user of potential victims..er, riders. From there the app will suggest a place they can meet. It will also show a picture of the person so you use a little hot-or-not in your decision making. (from cleantechnica.com)

By the way, we are eventually starting with Jungo in Trento. Jungo is a way to encourage hitchhiking by giving members a card which gives additional security. At the moment it is not empowered by ICT devices such as Iphones but this might change in future. First membership cards are arriving and Friday we were interviewed by the RAI television, and we did some holloywoodesque let’s-mimic-how-jungo-works camera shots. Lots of fun being an actor!

Interestingly for 2 months, 6 volunteers (called Kerouac) have been testing dynamic ridesharing readiness here in Trentino, along the Trento center - Mesiano - Povo route. For the first 4 weeks they have been doing normal hitchhiking twice a day while for the second 4 weeks, after some advertisement about Jungo, they have been doing hitchhiking using the Jungo cards. Overall they collected 750 rides!
Interestingly their average waiting time (AWT) decreased. And interestingly as well, females have smaller AWT. Males moved from a AWT of 22 minutes during the first 4 weeks to 11.4 minutes while females moved from 6 minutes to 2.7 minutes! Well, 2.7 minutes is definitely much less time than waiting for the bus!!!

This difference of performances based on gender reminded me of some research about this I read time ago.
In Sharing Nicely: On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production (best paper I ever read by the way, and released under Creative Commons!), Yochai Benkler reports some research from the paper “Mating Habits of Slugs: Dynamic Carpool Formation in the I-95/I-395 Corridor of Northern Virginia” by Frank Spielberg & Phillip Shapiro (a paper I was not able to download because it’s behind a gated journal, can you help me?):

In a deviation from gender-neutral pickup practices, solo women will not usually enter a car with two men already in it. “Unrelated” slugs on a line, however, will match up, whether male or female, irrespective of the gender of the driver.
This underscores the fact that personal security fears may be a serious obstacle to carpooling with strangers.
The matching practices suggest that security is improved by combining more than one rider with each solo driver, where the riders themselves are not preorganized in groups. Each pair—driver plus each rider, and both riders vis-à-vis the driver—provides each individual with some security against an aggressive stranger. The importance of strength in numbers and lack of personal relationship is indicated by the fact that solo women will join two men in a car if the woman and man were both in line and no relationship between the two men is indicated.
Carpoolers on this model seem to assume a prevalence and distribution of aggressive proclivities in the population that places a low probability on two randomly associated individuals cooperating aggressively. Given such a model of the prevalence and distribution of aggressive tendencies, fully impersonal cooperation can then be seen as safer than partially impersonal cooperation, where some subset of participants have a preexisting relationship.

And on a similar line, I read this table from “Car pooling clubs: solution for the affiliation problem in traditional/dynamic ridesharing systems” by Gonçalo Correia, José Manuel Viegas which reports evidence from “Levin, et al. Measurement of ‘Psychological’ Factors and their role in Transportation behaviour” (another paper behind gated journal I need help with):

Research by Levin, et al [5] at the University of Iowa reached the conclusion that gender of the potential poolers was of little consequence when the other part was an acquaintance, but became of great consequence when the other part was a stranger, see Table 1.
As can be seen in the table, the desirability of ride sharing decreases with the increase of strangers in the pool, especially for females. These results suggest that gender and prior knowledge of the potential pooler combine to determine the desirability of the other person for ridesharing. Moreover, different combination of these factors can lead to very different results: when the driver is a Female there’s a great difference between transporting two acquaintances-one nonaquaintance (10.84 points) and three nonaquaintances (3.49 points).

Finally, while browsing for these links I found a two-days workshop titled Real-Time Rides: A Smart Roadmap to Energy and Infrastructure Efficiency held very recently at MIT which contains most of the pointers to researchers and companies currently working on dynamic carpooling and the opportunities opened about it by new GPS-ready devices.

The SoNet FBK research group is happy to invite you to two talks by David Orban on April 8th in Trento.
The first talk, “The Open Internet Of Things”, will be about OpenSpime. It will be interesting if you are interested in sensors, positioning devices and memory, social, Web 2.0-style services in the real world, green technology, tech applied to the environment, open hardware and software, communications protocols, and future in general.
The second talk, “Preparing Humanity For The Impact Of Accelerating Technological Change”, will talk about the Singularity University, a recent new initiative funded by Nasa, Google and more.
I’ll wait you on April 8th!

First talk: The Open Internet Of Things
8 April 2009 - at 10.00 - Conference Room - Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Povo (TN) (up in the hills, see the map)
If we want the the forthcoming Internet of Things to flourish, the distributed smart sensor networks which take the current infrastructures for granted and base their necessarily autonomous activities on massive data collection, then we have to adopt an open architecture. Only an interoperable approach to the design of the next generation of hardware and software systems is going to be able and leverage the dramatic effects, and express the value to human civilization that the network of tens, or thousands of billions of new objects, the spime network is going to shape. For more info see http://www.openspime.com

Second talk: Preparing Humanity For The Impact Of Accelerating Technological Change
8 April 2009 - at 15.00 - Conference Room - Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Trento (downtown, see the map)
The impact of advanced technologies on our societies is becoming more and more extreme, exposing new tensions in our models of human relationships, learning, and values in policies, politics, and business. While relinquishment has been recommended by some, it appears that the way ahead will be the use of more, not less technology, as billions of people aim to achieve a high quality of life for themselves, and their children. The Singularity University, recently formed on an open, international and interdisciplinary approach employs an advanced curriculum to analyze how the future leaders of enterprise, culture, and science can best prepare to face the serious challenges ahead.

About the speaker:
David Orban is an entrepreneur and visionary. In recognition of his lifetime contribution to exponentially advancing technologies, he has been honored with the position of Advisor and European Lead to the prestigious Singularity University.
He is a Founder and Chief Evangelist of WideTag, Inc., a high technology start-up company providing the infrastructure for an open Internet of Things. David cuts across the limits of deep specialization to contribute to the new renaissance. He explains, “My vision is at the crossroads of technology and society as defined by their co-evolution.” David Orban’s personal motto is, “What is the question I should be asking?” This concept is his vehicle to accelerating cycles of invention and innovation in order to build the new world ahead.

Primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist Jane Goodall will be in Trento on February 27th for a public speaking titled “Reasons for hope”. The event is part of Darwin Year 2009 (check the entire program, with events from January up to June).

If you don’t know who Jane Goodall is, you can check her Wikipedia page or watch the video of her talk at TED embedded below (suggestion: watch at least the first 30 seconds!)

Her description from TED says:
Jane Goodall, dubbed by her biographer “the woman who redefined man,” has changed our perceptions of primates, people, and the connection between the two. Over the past 45 years, Goodall herself has also evolved — from steadfast scientist to passionate conservationist and humanitarian.

Very interesting retreat at my research institute FBK (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)! Here there is the program of the retreat. There are many uber-interesting invited speaker. Personally I’m really looking forward to listen Prabhakar Raghavan (Head of Yahoo! Research) – USA, Hendrik Berndt (VP & CTO of DoCoMo Eurolabs) – Germany/Japan, Ray Perrault (Director Artificial Intelligence Center – SRI) – USA and Wolfgang Wahlster (CEO and Scientific Director of DFKI) - Germany.
Let me know if you would like to join us!

New directions for scientific and technological research: a comparison of diverse views
Start: 29/01/2009 - 00:30
End: 30/01/2009 - 19:00
THE FUTURE OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL RESEARCH
PRO>RETREAT OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL CENTERS OF FBK
Trento, Italy, January 29-30 2009
(for the schedule of January 28th, see moreover)
Sala Conferenze Ovest, FBK
Via Sommarive 18, Povo (TN), Italy

January 29th (in streaming da giovedi’ 29/01)
9.00-9.30
Welcome & Opening Welcome by Andrea Zanotti (president of FBK)
The FBK Research Programs
Andrea Simoni (Director Center for Materials and Microsystems – FBK)
Paolo Traverso (Director Center for Information Technology – FBK)

9.30-11.00 - Nano & Micro Technologies (1)
Chairs: Pierluigi Bellutti – Head of MTLab, FBK; Lorenzo Gonzo – Head of Smart Optical Sensors and Interfaces, FBK
Bruno Murari (Scientific Advisor ST Microelectronics) - Italy
Peter Seitz (Vice-President Nano-medicine, CSEM SA) - Switzerland

11.00-11.30 Coffee break

11.30-13.00 Future Internet (1)
Chairs: Massimo Zancanaro –Head of Intelligent Interfaces & Interaction, FBK; Luciano Serafini – Head of Data & Knowledge Management, FBK
Mark Maybury (Executive Director – MITRE) – USA
Klaus Tochtermann (Director Know-Center Graz) – Austria

13.00-14.30 Lunch

14.30-16.00 Nano & Micro Technologies (2)
Chairs: Alberto Lui – New Materials and Analytical Methods for Biosensors and Bioelectronics Group, FBK; Leandro Lorenzelli – BioMEMS Group, FBK
Pietro Siciliano (Resp. IMM CNR – Sezione di Lecce) – Italy
David Holden (CEA- Minatec) - France

16.30-18.00 Future Internet (2)
Chair: Marco Pistore – Head of Service Oriented Applications, FBK
Hendrik Berndt (VP & CTO of DoCoMo Eurolabs) – Germany/Japan
Roger Kilian-Kehr (Research Architekt, SAP Research Center CEC Karlsruhe)

January 30th (in streaming da venerdì 30/01)
9.00-10.30 2009 - The Year of Innovation - The Challenges for ICT (1)
Chair: Alessandro Cimatti – Head of Embedded Systems, FBK
João da Silva (Director of the Network & Communication DG-INFSO)
Malik Ghallab (CEO for Science and Technology – INRIA) - France

10.30-11.00 Coffee break

11.00-12.30 Future Internet (3)
Chairs: Marcello Federico & Bernardo Magnini — Heads of Human Language Technologies, FBK
Yuichi Matsushima (Vice President of NICT) – Japan
Prabhakar Raghavan (Head of Yahoo! Research) – USA

12.30-14.00 Lunch

14.00-15.30 Embedded Intelligence: Ambient Computing & Intelligent Interaction
Chair: Oliviero Stock – Senior Fellow, FBK

Ray Perrault (Director Artificial Intelligence Center – SRI) – USA
Wolfgang Wahlster (CEO and Scientific Director of DFKI) - Germany

15.30-16.00 Coffee break

16.00-17.30 2009 - The Year of Innovation - The Challenges for ICT (2)
Chair: Paolo Traverso, Director Center for Information Technology, FBK
Lutz Heuser (Vice President of SAP Research) – Germany
Dario Avallone (Director R&D Engineering) - Italy

17.30-19.00 Concluding Remarks - Moderatore: Michele Lanzinger (Direttore Museo Tridentino di Scienze Naturali)
Lorenzo Dellai – President of the Trentino Autonomous Province
Andrea Zanotti – President of FBK
Andrea Simoni – Director Center for Materials and Microsystems
Paolo Traverso – Director Center for Information Technology
Discussion & Remarks by the Invited Speakers

19.00-20.00 Aperitif

Sala Conferenze Ovest, FBK
Via Sommarive 18, Povo, Trento, Italy
reatreatinfopoint@fbk.eu

PLEASE NOTE: the talks are in English and attendance is upon invitation

As far as the Center for Information Technology is concerned, two additional days are being added to the programme, as follows:

- The first part on Wednesday, Jan. 28, starting from 9 a.m. and dealing with the Trentino Research System
- The second part on Monday, Feb. 2, starting from 9.30 a. m. for FBK researchers only

January 28th (no streaming!)
9.00 – 9.30 Welcome & Introduction — Paolo Traverso Director of the Center for Information Technology, FBK

9.30 – 10.00 Francesco De Natale
Director of the Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Scienza dell’Informazione (DISI), University of Trento

10.00 - 10.30 Imrich Chlamtac
President of the CREATE-NET Research Consortium

10.30 – 11.00 Coffee Break

11.00 – 11.30 Raffaele De Amicis
Director of the Center for Advanced Computer Graphics
Technologies (GraphiTech)

11.30 – 12.00 Corrado Priami
President & CEO of The Microsoft Research - University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology (CoSBi)

12.00 – 12.30 Remo Job
Dean of Facoltà di Scienze Cognitive, Università di Trento

12.30 – 13.00 Discussion & Concluding Remarks

I’ve been somehow coworking (I just created the page in the Italian Wikipedia which was missing) the past weeks, i.e. I’ve been visiting friends in their offices for meetings and then remaining there for working: when I have an Internet connection I can do my work in any place and visiting other talented people is always a source of new inspirations and fruitful discussions and a more creative way of working and seeing your daily job from different angles and perspectives.
So this post is just to put out there a sort of placeholder: anybody interested in formalizing some coworking spaces in Trento? Anybody maybe already doing it?
(Credits: photo by “hillary h” released on Flickr under Creative Commons AttributionShare Alike license)