Alessandro Rossini’s Web Site

I had a short vacation in Moldova together with my friend Diego. Probably you are asking yourself “Why Moldova!?”. At least this was the reaction of all of my friends when I told them that I had planned a trip to Chişinău. To be honest, despite the fact that I came back from this trip just few days ago, I am not sure what to answer to this question.

As far as I am concerned, I just wanted to have a trip to an east European country, eventually an ex USSR country. The idea was to go to a country which was culturally, architecturally, geographically and economically speaking very different to what I am used to. After several discussions with Diego about which country to visit, Moldova caught our curiosity… And there we went.

I have to admit that I knew really little about this country before to go, and two things impressed me the most there. The first is, unfortunately, the poverty. The time seems to have stopped in the Nineties there. The average monthly salary in Moldova is around 2500 MDL (151 EUR) while in Norway is 30000 NOK (3533 EUR). Of course, life is cheaper in Moldova than in Norway, but even normalising the salary to the cost of life the difference remains huge.

The other thing that left me puzzled is the lack of linguistic and cultural identity. Native Moldovans belong to the Romanian ethnic group. The official language in Moldova is Romanian, although natives speak a Moldavian dialect which is not so different from the original Romanian. However, Russians and Ukrainians form a large ethnic group in Moldova. Russian is then the default second language at all levels of education, and everyone in the country can speak it fluently. Oddly enough, local Russians refuse to speak Romanian and oblige native Moldovans to speak Russian. Walking around Chişinău I heard more conversations in Russian rather than Romanian, which is quite sad. Maybe this is a superficial analysis of the integration problems, but what kind of cultural identity is this?

I learned a lot from this “very original” trip… especially to give value to the things I am lucky to have in my life. Being at home with all the comforts seems like a luxury now… I hope I will always remember about it.

I have not written any post about my summer vacations in Italy, Spain and Hungary, but now they are far away and I will skip them. I just want to share my experience at the last conference I participated, namely the Nordic Workshop in Programming Theory in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen, Denmark.

As always I travelled together with Adrian and this time I had to share the hotel room with him since my travelling budget for 2009 has been in red since July… Fortunately Adrian is not employed at the University of Bergen but at the Bergen University College, and it seems that funding is less problematic there.

The conference was very well organised and covered very many topics of computer science. We had the presentations of our two abstracts almost at the end of the conference and we spent a lot of time modifying the slides rather than listening to the talks, but everything went fine in the end.

During my stay I had the chance to test my skills in Scandinavian languages with some local. Just for the records, written Danish and Norwegian (in the bokmål variant) are rather similar, so similar that reading Danish is not a problem for me… but the spoken counterparts are definitely very different. Spoken Danish sounds to me like a continuous stream of (guttural) sounds, with no chances to understand when a word stops and when the next starts. I hope that no one will take it personally if I say that it seems like Danes do not make any effort to pronounce words clearly.

But there is even more… Danish has a rather weird number system. The tens from fifty on are not based on the number 10, as is the case in most European languages (French being another outstanding exception). This strange system combines two archaic ways of counting: 20-based instead of 10-based and fossilized expressions for two and a half, three and a half and four and a half. This is the result:

After this experience, I think that these Norwegian comedians are not so far from reality.

This time it was the TOOLS conference in Zurich, Switzerland. Me and Adrian arrived on a Saturday, without any particular plan for the evening. Many locals suggested us to go to Lucerne because of the first edition of the Lucerne festival. Adrian managed to convince me to go there, and I have to admit it was a good idea. Loads of people, music played on all the squares of the old town, stands providing food and drinks. And right after the sunset, the best fireworks I have ever seen: 25 minutes of pyrotechnic show with lights coming from both sky and lake… Just lovely!

All the stereotypes about Swiss precision and efficiency were destroyed in one go on the way back to Zurich. We were supposed to take the train from Lucerne at 2:30, but probably too many people shared with us the same plan. The result was kilometric queues on the ticket machines and people packed in trains like in India. The train we took did not even arrive to Zurich and despite the promises of the railways personnel there, no further train came before one hour. In the end, tired of waiting, we took a taxi back to the city.

Well, despite this “original” start, the conference went very well. Zurich is lovely and welcomed us with a great warm summer weather. The ETH, which hosted the conference, is located on top of a hill with a nice view over the city. The event was well organised and composed by several co-located conferences and workshops. Adrian made a brilliant presentation of our last work and many asked questions about it. I feel like the goals of our participation to the conference have been all fulfilled. Food was also great; to eat once more authentic Fondue and Rösti was a pleasure.

I left Zurich by train on Saturday, and my destination was not Bergen but Tortoreto, my home town in Italy. The trip home was a sort of odyssey. The train I took in Milan had broken air conditioning system and I had to stay inside it for 5 hours with no chance to open the windows… And if this was not enough, the catering services of the Italian railways had a strike the very same day, i.e. it was not even possible to buy water! You can imagine what this lead to, I will not spend time describing it. Italy is somehow always able to remind me that the choice to move away was the right one.

Yes, I did it again. The 7 mountains of Bergen in day, 13 hours and 8 minutes to be precise. Despite the rain, I spent 1 hour and 12 minutes less then my first time.

Special thanks goes to “min kjære” Synnøve, who shared with me in both editions, plus Antonio and Mikal who joined us this year.

I have the feeling that my blog is slowly becoming just a collection of reports about my trips… Not that there is anything wrong with that, but a bit more of variety would be better. Anyway, here I am once more talking about research and travelling.

During March I had two trips. The first was in Marburg, a little town about one hour train north of Frankfurt, Germany. This trip was not due to a conference, but because I needed to work together with my colleague Adrian – who was spending three months as visitor research at the University of Marburg – on an paper which we had to submit for a journal publication. Marburg is a delicious university town, it reminds me a bit L’Aquila, at least the L’Aquila I am familiar with. I have been staying one week in a king sized room of a guest house, with furnitures from the beginning of the 20th century and a bathroom that was probably bigger than the room I have in Bergen. No, I did not have money to waste in my travelling budget, on the contrary I tried to spare… This was actually the cheapest solution available since Marburg was hosting a big conference on Medicine exactly that week and all the hotels were fully booked. We managed to get finished with the paper and to submit it. But fortunately it was not only work, we have also been able to enjoy German beer and food. I enjoyed so much a couple of “auflauf” (casserole) I tried. I learned also something curious: many of the public toilets in Marburg has special sink specifically designed to… puke. A local PhD student commented with “We have strong drinking traditions in Germany…”. Amazing!

The second trip was to York, as always together with Adrian, to attend the FASE 2009 conference, part of ETAPS. Here I presented our last published paper. I was not so stressed in the end, and everything went smoothly. I am very satisfied by the presentation, and receiving compliments from colleagues and other researcher was a great reward. The very same evening after the presentation we had a “gala dinner”, which was actually delicious, and of course we continued the celebrations in the pubs of the city centre. The ale beers from the local breweries helped me to forget about the research carried on in the last months… The city of York was somehow fascinating, also because of its history. Founded by Romans in the year 71 and captured by the Vikings in 866, it shares a lot with the history of both my home country and the country where I live now.

I hope to be able to upload pictures from both trips soon!

As always with some delay I can finally write a bit about what my experience for the NWPT’08 conference in Tallinn, Estonia. The trip started immediately with some emotions: my colleague Adrian realised that he forgot the passport home just before to go to the airport, so we had to catch a taxi to run first to his place and then finally to our destination. Fortunately we had no problem to check-in and leave Bergen, and late in the night we were in the old city of Tallinn.

The NWPT’08 conference took place in a an historical building in the old city. The articles presented at the conference were quite theoretical, and I have to admit that I did not understand many of them, but this is probably (hopefully? ) normal when people are coming from very different areas of research. I finally had my first presentation as well. We had indeed two extended abstracts accepted in the workshop, and I presented the one titled “A category-theoretical Approach to the Formalisation of Version Control in MDE”. Despite the initial twitter, I have to say that the presentation was smooth and I am really satisfied with it.

I had the chance to go a bit around the old city of Tallinn during the weekend, and it is lovely. There is a lot of history everywhere, and sometimes it seems to be back in time. However, despite the old-fashion look, Tallinn is really ahead in time for what concerns Internet. Yes, because Internet is available for free everywhere through wifi access. Note that with “for free” I do not mean that you can steal the connection from some unwary network owner, but that it is provided by the public administration. Estonian people I met seemed very helpful and friendly, and most of them were able to speak English fluently. Last but not least, the food we tasted in the restaurants was definitely very good. At the end, it was a very nice experience, except for a last detail…

The journey back to Bergen was a sort of odyssey. We had a connected flight to Bergen, with stop over at Copenhagen. The day that we were supposed to leave, we woke up in the middle of an extreme snow storm. Our flight was not cancelled, so we had to reach the airport at 16:30, with expected departure at 18:00. The taxi driver had even problems to come to the airport because of the loads of snow all over the streets. The situation looked not promising at all, but they were keeping our flight delayed. After waiting many hours at the gate with no precise information, the flight was declared cancelled at 00:00. The airline could not provide us an hotel, since they had to handle so many cancellation during the day. After having our flight rescheduled for the day after, we had to come back to our hotel, where they had fortunately two rooms available for the night. But the story does not end here… We had exactly the same schedule for the day after, but the luck was not with us. The flight took off at 21:00 instead of 18:00, and we obviously lost the connection in Copenhagen. We hoped that they could reschedule us to take the last flight from Copenhagen to Bergen at 22:45, but guess what? It was cancelled due to another snow storm in Stockholm… So another night abroad, this time in a Radisson SAS hotel at least. After more than two days of journey, finally we landed in Bergen the morning after…

Next post will be probably from Italy, I am going home for Christmas vacation finally…

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.

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…