Dome of Doom

Just a quick preview of a graphic that I plan to use at the April 16 panel discussion about "Monuments in Peril:Venice" at The Clark at Williams college in Williamstown, MA.
Kyle Miller prepared this for me and it will be refined to make a major point about the value of the flood gates in Venice.If you can recognize what city is depicted in the picture, you may perhaps guess what is going to be the gist of my argument...

Spring skiing and fiducials

Yes.  As promised, I did go skiing today and it was fabulous!  Even though it's a Saturday, and despite a mandatory stop at 10,000 waves on my way down the mountain, I still managed to get some work done today (including making this blog entry).

Most notable is the progress on the design of the fiducials for the Venice simtable, which our Los Alamos friends are plugging away at.

Next Friday we are broadcasting a live skype demo of our progress on the simtable in direct connection with the Venice mobility office...  Stay tuned!

White googley spring

Today, we woke up to several inches of fluffy new snow here in Santa Fe.

I took the opportunity to go snowshoeing early this morning.  It was heavenly! Upon return, I had a skype conversation with a new contact in Silicon Valley (who shall remain un-identified for now) to pick up the thread about the Venice Mashup camp that we hope Google will sponsor in collaboration with UNESCO. Buzz about this event is already starting to spread...

Tomorrow a bunch of us are going skiing on the fresh powder.

Not bad for a snowy day in late March!

Handling report searches in Dspace

Our project repository is now completely accessible via our Web portal.  All you need to do is type a search string (like the word "art") into the search box (top right) and voilà!  The results are displayed and you can return to the web portal by clicking the title bar.  All of our 20 years of projects are catalogued in  Dspace, an online repository system developed by MIT and HP.  Each entry is handled through a unique URI (Universal Resource Identifier) which is a permalink that uniquely points to the report's bibliographical records.  Every word in the bibliographical record is fully indexed and the search is very fast.  

We're working on including pointers to the report's PDF and on a process to export the report archive to knowledge reef here in Santa Fe.

The Los Alamos Dynamic Duo

The interactive interface for the Venice Boat traffic model simulation table (Simtable) is being developed by a dynamic duo (Skyler and August) from Los Alamos, (in)famous because of "the lab".  Eventually, the table will look like the picture at left, but will react to touch and to "fiducials" placed on it.

We just went through the first design discussion and we are looking forward to the early prototypes that should be coming out soon.  There will be a main simulation fiducial for closing canals and for deciding on "one way" or two way traffic in a specific time period and for a specific boat type.  Each boat type will also get its own fiducial, that users will be able to place upon any canal segment to visualize data related to that boat type on that canal.  Look for some demos in the coming weeks!

Vernal Equinox

Day and night are supposedly of equal length on the equinox, but are they really?  Trees are blooming here in Santa Fe and the days will be getting longer.  Any skiing that takes place from now on will be true "spring skiing"!

The ide(a)s of March

As Nick and I are ultimating our epic cross-country drive, while tweeting away as we go, I have managed to get some work done as we traveled from MA, through CT, NY, NJ, PA, WV, OH, IN, IL, MO, KS, into CO where we are right now. On this anniversary of Cesar's assassination, as our finances hit their nadir and Nick and I celebrate our voyage at the zenith of high altitude skiing, here are a few of the accomplishments that happened thanks to technology unimaginable just a few years ago, but more importantly thanks also to the wonderful partnerships that I am so fortunate to be involved with all around the world...

• Kyle and I have submitted our application for uScript to be part of Google Summer of Code. He was in Halifax, Nova Scotia and I was somewhere in Kansas when this happened...
  
• Andrea Mancuso and Alberto Gallo are helping Ginny Mason complete a spread for an upcoming National Geographic magazine article about Venice which will cite the Venice Project Center and Forma Urbis
• Redfish and I have submitted a short proposal to the City of Boston's CIO Bill Oates and his chief technology guru Nigel Jacobs to explore porting our pothole mapper (recently cited by an MIT paper) to Android and the Google Phone
• Under Steve Guerin's supervision, Tyler White in Santa Fe has revamped the energence web site using joomla, making Adrian Hewitt very happy
• Chris Murray has created version 2.0 of the Venice 2.0 site, which includes this blog
• Meanwhile Saul Farber has fixed the error 400 problem that had plagued our Word Press sites (preservenice too) for months, despite valiant efforts by Chris Murray, Tim Navien and Andrea Mancuso to resolve the issue
• Kyle and I have begun the process of collaborating with WPI's Admissions and Marketing departments who have expressed the desire to include the Venice Project Center in the next Viewbook WPI sends out to perspective students
• Official notice was sent out about the awarding of $137,749 for my contribution to the three-year NASA research project entitled Digital Earth Watch (DEW). The first workshop is already planned for April 23 and 24 at the University of New Hampshire. Steve Guerin and I will be flying up from Santa Fe for the occasion
  
• With a three-way (Limon, CO+Boston+Venice) skype conference call, we have resumed the preparation for the Venice Mashup Camp in September. The current plan is to have Google as the main sponsor, in collaboration with UNESCO, highlighting the usefulness of mashups in the context of the preservation of World Heritage Sites, using Venice as the model for a global extension of the concept
• Plans for my participation in a roundtable on April 16 at the Clark Museum at Williams college, with, among others, the curator of the current Venice exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Frederick Ilchman, were finalized.
• My good friend and colleague Prof. Nicholas DeMonchaux of Berkeley invited me to participate in a joint research effort with the Univ. of Architecture in Venice. We are finalizing the grant application this week...

Not bad for a week on the road! These are just some ideas for the ides of March. More on each later!

Alea jacta ass...

Just a couple of weeks after returning from New Mexico, I am "on the road" again, this time driving from Massachusetts to Santa Fe with my old donkey of a Subaru Forester which already has 217,000 miles on it.
As the saying goes: "I am throwing the hat over the wall" and committing to a long term collaboration with my friends at the Santa Fe Complex, whether the WPI Santa Fe Project Center takes off or not... although I am sure it will.
I am taking Nick with me for a bonding father-son experience which will see us in St. Louis some time tomorrow and in Denver hopefully by Thursday/Friday so we can hit the Colorado slopes over the weekend as we descend into Santa Fe from the northern rockies.
We'll get our (ass) kicks on Route 66 as we cross the Rubicon this week...  

What does this have to do with Venice?  You'll find out soon... stay tuned!

Alea jacta est!

Hibernating at the complex

Well... a month has gone by since the last post and one may suspect we've done nothing in the meantime. But one would be wrong, wouldn't one?

Indeed a lot of snowshoeing was accomplished in this month.  Some skiing too.  And a trip to Santa Fe, and a bunch of projects, grants, ideas and proposals on both sides of the Atlantic...  It was a busy month and the blog suffered for it.  But now we're back on track after the winter hiatus...

We stand ready for a whole new anniversary year in this new Obama era of openness, hope, honesty and transparency.  We will be impeccable with our words, will make NO assumptions, won't take anything personally and will ALWAYS do our best. 

Obamanos!