Alessandro Rossini’s Web Site

One month ago I was in Toulouse, France, to attend the MoDELS’08 conference… Sounds important, isn’t it? Well, actually for me it really was. MoDELS’08 has been the first international conference I attended, and I am glad that I started with a very relevant one. I had the chance to go there because me and my colleague Adrian had an article accepted — the first in my PhD programme — in the ChaMDE 2008 workshop, a satellite event of the conference.

The six-days conference was plenty of researchers from world-wide, including many of the “big names” in software engineering. Getting in touch with some of them was definitely interesting. Many of the works presented at the conference seemed brilliant… I even learned what does it mean “megamodelling” — which is, in my opinion, the most childish keyword ever appeared in computer science. However, I have to admit that I was also disappointed by the general lack of applied results. The interest of industry in Model-Driven Engineering might vanish again if research does not (quickly) provide anything really useful to them. There is a urgent need for techniques and tools that simply work, and this is possible only if we have mature standards, which is definitely not the case nowadays. None of the works focused on that topic… Kind of surprising to me. Of course, theory is fundamental, but sometimes I had the feeling of listening to someone “selling thin air” rather than showing concrete results. To be honest, the idea that some theory “might be implemented” one day by the industry have never convinced me. The fact that the popularity of Model-Driven Engineering nowadays is not the one that researchers expected ten years ago is just an additional proof for me. Maybe one day I will be selling thin air myself too, who knows… But for the time being it seems to me that research is going in a dangerous direction…

Anyway, the city of Toulouse is just gorgeous. So old and so modern at the same times, it offers a lot of sightseeing, attractions and restaurants were we had delicious meals and wines. I am waiting to upload a bunch of pictures on Flickr. Unfortunately my Linux distribution provides a buggy version of the software I use to handle pictures and I have to wait the (lazy) developers to read my bug report and fix it… More complaints on this in my next post.

Well, at the moment that’s it… My next destination? NWPT’08 conference in Tallin, Estonia. I will present a work there, so keep the finger crossed for me as always!

This year I applied for 20 working days of vacation… Strange feeling to have vacations constrained by a contract… Well, I am a full-time worker now, first or last it had to happen.

Planning my vacations was not so easy this year. I wanted to go home in Italy, but at the same time I wanted some action somewhere else in the world… And I had to make it fit with some deadlines at the University. The final choice was the following: Italia at the end of June, and Россия — it means just Russia, but I could not resist to write it in Cyrillic — at the end of July.

A journey to Italy always gives me a mixture of contradictory feelings. On one hand it is pleasant to come back to my home-sweet-home after a long while: my family, my wonderful nephews and niece, my (few) good old friends, good weather, good sea, good food, good wine… On the other hand, the little old-fashion culture of Italy makes me pissed off every time I clash with it. Italian society seems hopeless and passive, staring at the cultural and economical decline. You can sense it everywhere, even in the speeches and faces of people. Every time I am preparing my trip to Italy I am so excited, but once back I always feel that my vacation has a sour after-taste. Anyway, my home village is very little and I did not do that much except sunbathing, swimming and going out with my friends. At least one day I was brave enough to climb the Gran Sasso mountain up to the top (2912m). This was the most exciting moment of my vacation in Italy, and I have to thank Antonio for being my guide.

If the first vacation was calm and relaxing, the one that came after was absolutely thrilling and exhausting. I visited St. Petersburg and Moscow, together with Diego and Federico, probably the best — or the worst depending on the point of view… — “colleagues” I could ask. The same way Diego said it to me one year ago, now I can say as well “la Russia mi ha cambiato la vita” (Russia changed my life). Part of me will never be the same after this vacation… It was probably the best I have ever had, well done guys!

St. Petersburg is a lovely old-fashion city, quite European in the way of living, but still Soviet in its symbols. Being full of art, it was a very good place to enlarge my photography experience. Moscow is young and dynamic, somehow too big for my taste, but definitely magnificent. Very good night life, even though we had only a couple of chances to experience it. It is difficult to compare those two cities, they are very different but I was fascinated by both.

I was very surprised by this country and by its people. Russians, especially Russian girls, were extremely charming and welcoming. I got in touch very special persons, who helped me in many ways and acted as tourist guides just for me. Curiously, I noticed that Russians dress up on more occasions than Europeans do. Even to go for a casual walk, a Russian woman could wear high heels and a nice dress. A hardcore feminist might have the wrong impression that women do this because they are victimized, but Russian women themselves explained it this way, “We only live once; I want to look and feel my best”. I was actually very glad of it. Moreover, all the stereotypes I heard before about criminality in Russia were exaggerated. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we spent most of our time either sightseeing or in our apartment, but I had the impression that both St. Petersburg and Moscow are not more dangerous then other big cities in Europe.

What else can I say? Probably that I will be back in Russia one day, hopefully soon! I uploaded pictures from my trips. Check my Flickr photostream, and do not forget to leave comments!

До свидания.

There is a town in the world where once every year almost 5000 people are waking up with only one desire: climb up 7 mountains before the day is over. The name of this town? Bergen.

I was one of those crazy people who managed to finish the so called “7-fjellsturen”. My equipment was just a backpack with a camera, a jacket, a bottle of water, and some sandwiches, but what I needed the most was a lot of motivation and adrenaline.

I started at 9:00 and finished at 23:00, walking for about 35Km and going up for about 2400m in total.

I am exhausted, stiff, and aching, but it was worth to do it. The weather was perfect, with clear sky and mild temperature. I never enjoyed the nature that much, and at the end of the day I really felt part of it. Now I am left with a diploma, a very exclusive t-shirt, and a lot of good memories…

I want to thank Synnøve, for being the best company I could desire for this trip, and Francesca, for giving me a bar of chocolate when I needed sugars to go on.

It is not really a news that I open this post saying that I did not have so much time to write and bla bla bla… But it is actually the truth. My first semester at the University is almost over. I did not touch that much my research project, but I had a lot to do anyway.

I took three courses, the first was Category Theory, the “theory of arrows” as the professor defined it, abstract mathematics for humans… The second was Norwegian Level 1, pretty self-explanatory, and the third was Theory of Science and Ethics, a very interesting course about possible ethical problems of scientific research. In the latter I had to explain my research plan in about 300 words comprehensible by “a guy on the street”. It seemed trivial at the beginning, but believe me, it was not. At the end I reached a good compromise between details and understandability, maybe I will upload it here as well, at least some of my friends will understand what I do in my life.

I have been also teaching assistant for Programming II, a course about basic/intermediate Java staff. I was mainly preparing some mandatory assignment and relative solutions, taking care of the organization of the students into groups, and last but not least doing some system administration to create user accounts, something that took so (too) much time. It was really strange to be at the same time a student and a teaching assistant.

I had some little trip at least. During Easter I visited Sognefjord and slept in Selseng, Sogn og Fjordane. Incredible experience there: we had an outdoor jacuzzi with 40C inside the water, and -20 in the air… To complete the atmosphere we had clear sky, full moon, mountains covered by snow all around, beer, and very nice company… almost a perfect night. I have been also in Lindås, Nordhordaland, with the Department of Computer Science. We had the research school there, a series of seminars mainly given by PhD or Post-Doc students. The social event was canoe, this was the first time for me.

I had the chance to try my new waterproof camera. Yes, the Canon EOS is great, but I wanted a point and shoot camera for extreme situations, so I bought a new Olympus 1030SW: waterproof, shockproof, crushproof, freezeproof… I can do almost everything with it! But I also bought two new Canon objectives, an EFS 17-55mm f/2.8 and an EF 50mm f/1.8, together with a new Sigma 530 flash and a Gorilla Pod SLR, just to avoid that my reflex camera becomes jealous.

You probably saw an improvement in the quality of the pictures, don’t you? At least I hope so…

What else? Well, next Sunday I will climb all the 7 mountains surrounding Bergen in one day. It is an annual event, called “7 fjellstur” (literally the 7 mountains trip). I am training a bit more this week to be in shape for the event. Let’s see what happens…

As always, pictures will follow.

Yesterday I have been driving a car after several months, and I understood how much I miss driving and especially driving my first and only car, a Škoda Fabia 1.9TDI silver colour, bought in 2001 and sold in Christmas’ Eve 2007 because of my move to Norway.

I had to do it long long time ago, but I had not time at all to do it… This is my tribute to the car that drove me all over Italy and Europe, giving me a lot of satisfactions and not showing a single problem despite my GT drive style.

Goodbye my little Fabia…

Americans were the first to land on the Moon, Italians (and in particular researchers from Abruzzo, my home region) were the first to “photograph” the female G spot…

Read the full article here.

Finally someone from the Norwegian University who describes how many problems dialects can cause to foreigners willing to integrate…

Read the full article here.

Fortunately or unfortunately 2008 has come!

Even though I found not so nice weather and got a flu during my vacations in Italy, after all I had a very nice time with my family and friends. Fabio has been a great host, he showed me Milano, Sondrio, Como, and the surroundings of the Como’s lake. I had a kind of “Lombardia in a nutshell” trip. I enjoyed so much also New Year’s eve, thanks to the company of Andrea, Hilde and all their friends.

But at the end, as expected, I had to come back in the rainy Bergen… And here I am, without being homesick yet. Today is a very important date in my life, I finally started the PhD programme here in Bergen. All the staff at the University was very very kind with me, I had a tour to meet most of the people working at the Department of Informatics, and after dealing with some formalities I got into my own office, located on the fjord side of the building (that will be unfortunately obscured in some months by some new University’s building ). To please some of my geek friends I also add that I have a very powerful Dell PC with a 24” LCD monitor, running Fedora GNU/Linux 8.

The work environment seems pleasant, I am really satisfied and I look forward to becoming really productive. It actually seems that some people kept the finger crossed for me. Well, if you did so please continue like this, I would like to end the 2008 positive like today!

Finally some vacations! My life has been a great rush lately, so I really needed to take a pause and relax.

Today, despite the extreme weather conditions in Oslo (-11C and fog), I managed to fly back to Italy, where I will stay for a short while. I will spend one week with my family and then I will visit my friend Fabio in Milan. We will celebrate New Year’s eve together in an “Italian-Norwegian” party in Como’s lake.

Thereby, I will try to be as far as possible from my laptop before 2008 starts, so I take this chance to wish everyone Merry Christmas, Buon Natale, Bon Nadal, Feliz Navidad, Joyeux Noël, God Jul…

It is about five months that I moved to Norway, and I can definitely say that “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”. My life has been really full of happenings, but as always I have too short time to write about them all.

Well, let’s start from my social life. My purpose of having mainly local friends has been at the moment a partial failure. People here seem to need more time to get confident with someone, and my personal experience is that is much easier to become friends with girls than guys… I do not know what to think about it. Being Italian did not “help me” that much, I had a couple of unpleasant experiences with that but I still feel confident that in the future, especially once I will be able to speak Norwegian fluently, things will be much better.

So as you can imagine I had to spend a lot of efforts to enter a little network of friends, and even though sometimes I still feel that I still miss something, I met some very nice persons, who helped me in the difficult moments and who gave me a lot of remembering. My special thanks go to Mikal, Federico, Silje, Petra, Sonia, Valentin, Enrichetto, Diego, Fabio, and Regine, (merely ordered by who I met first) for all the moments shared together.

I finally started to study Norwegian. Here the approach with the languages is completely different from what I am used to have in Italy. They have two official forms of written Norwegian — Bokmål that is the one I study (literally “book language”, used by 86% of the population) and Nynorsk (literally “new Norwegian”, used by 14% of the population). On the contrary, there is no officially sanctioned standard of spoken Norwegian.

My course is a 48-hour intensive course, and I have to say that my Norwegian skills improved considerably, but it is still hard to try to jump into a conversation. I am mainly trained to listen to the spoken variety of the urban upper and middle class in East Norway, upon which Bokmål is primarily based, because this is the form generally taught to foreign student. In real life instead, people use to speak their own dialect with anyone, and they are able to have a fluent communication even if their spoken variants can have significant differences (especially when coming from very distant rural areas). Anyway, I will continue with an intermediate course the next year, not only because I really want to improve my skills but also because I have to be ready to speak fluent Norwegian as soon as possible.

The reason is that another big change is going to happen again in my life. I was a bit unsatisfied with my work lately, so I decided to come back to my original plan of continuing my studies. Becoming a researcher has been one of my biggest ambitions, so I applied for a PhD scholarship at the University of Bergen in October. I received a positive answer from the committee in the early days of November, while I was having the visit of my parents. At the beginning I was surprised and shocked, but it has been very nice to share this moment with them.

This PhD scholarship counts three years of research and one year of teaching, meaning that I will live in Bergen for a long while. I will start on the 10th of January 2008, and I will probably be travelling several times and spending some months abroad as visitor student, hopefully in some sunny warm place where I will be able to charge a bit the batteries. I will research in the field of Model-Driven Development, under the supervision of Prof. Khalid A. Mughal and Torill Hamre. I really look forward to start this new experience, my enthusiasm and motivation is really high. It was a difficult choice, but I feel it was the best for the pursuit of my personal expectations in life.

That’s all at the moment. Please, keep the finger crossed for me once more.