Another term, another blog post. Nick and I just drove back from Santa Fe via the "southern" route (I-40) all the way from New Mexico to North Carolina, then we took the
Blue Ridge Parkway through the Appalachians and up to New England. We had a good couple of months in Santa Fe. Nick got accepted to the
Santa Fe University of Art and Design (SFUAD) where he will start a degree in
Contemporary Music in the fall. I will be there in term A as well, courtesy of my dear friend (and dean) Rick Vaz. I will get a chance to work on some academic papers and grants, while advising the preparation for the Venice teams remotely (via skype) with co-advisor
Fred Bianchi, who will conduct the meetings at WPI and will no doubt inject his computer music background into our 8 fall projects in Venice. We should have some really interesting topics this year!
It's going to be nice to be able to focus on research for one full month. My esteemed WPI colleague,
Seth Tuler, will be teaching the
Venice preparation course and will join me for a couple of weeks in Venice this summer to get
himself prepped for the prep.
The first official full contingent of 24 WPI students worked at the
Santa Fe Project Center (SFPC) to complete
6 challenging projects at the newest of
all WPI project centers this spring under the guidance of former WPI Provost,
John Orr and myself. Once again, we all benefited from the close collaboration with the
Santa Fe Complex, who provided us with state-of-the-art facilities where we could conduct our projects. Executive Director Roy Wroth and Steve Guerin and everyone else at the Complex mentored our students and made them feel very welcome in Santa Fe. The results of the six projects were very well received by all our sponsors, which included the
Santa Fe Watershed Association, the
City of Santa Fe (Dept. of
Housing and Community Development), the
Santa Fe Metropoilitan Planning Organization, the
Santa Fe Trails bus system, the
Santa Fe Indian School and
Riversource. In preparation for the final presentations, the teams briefly illustrated their projects at a very successful event that the
WPI alumni office organized at the Santa Fe Complex with a couple of dozen WPI alumni in attendance, many working at the nearby "labs" at
Los Alamos and
Sandia. It was a great convivial occasion to boost our collective
esprit de corps. John and I followed up with a marvelous dinner at the home of Cathy and Paul Kalenian, whose family supports the
WPI Kalenian Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
By the time final presentations came around, the teams had honed their skills and were able to dazzle the audience with their brilliance...
David Coss, the mayor of Santa Fe was in attendance for some of the presentations. The teams made us all proud and certainly set a high bar for future teams to aspire to. We have already recruited 28 students for next spring, for the second official year of operation of the SFPC.
We had many dinners and get-togethers at the "treehouse" where Nick and I lived, overlooking Sun and Moon mountains, Atalaya and the whole city of Santa Fe. It became quite a center for brainstorming and whiteboarding, especially after work.
I even had the honor of hosting a dinner there with nobel-laureate
Murray Gell-Mann, the discoverer of
quarks! Among other things, Murray is a co-founder of the
Santa Fe Institute, together with
George Cowan (WPI '41). We had lots of fun and laughter... and good food. Murray is a living encyclopedia. He is a wonderful, jovial, fun-loving individual who can hold erudite conversations about any subject and in any language. He even knew everything about the
Origins of the Veneti! I look forward to more "Mondays with Murray" at the
SMA treehouse when I go back in September... Speaking of Origins, while in Santa Fe I reconnected with
David Comas in Barcelona to finish up the
Genographic DNA tests to trace the mythical ascendants of the Veneti, based on our contacts in Wales, Britanny, Turkey, Lusatia and the Veneto. I'll be sending out the follow-ups this week.
With Josh Thorp and Scott Wittenburg, we also made progress on
DEW (Digital Earth Watch), our "virtual"
Picturepost app for Android smartphones, which allows you to take repeat pictures from the same location to monitor climate change over time (
funded by NASA). We are
developing a new version to be out next week, with
new user interfaces, navigation, playback and more...
Finally, while we were in Santa Fe, the
Innocentive Challenge was officially issued, with
a $25,000 reward for the best algorithm to identify "real" potholes from the data collected by
our StreetBump app.
Mayor Menino of Boston and his office of
New Urban Mechanics were behind
the project, which continues to receive lots of media attention, most recently on
Boston Channel 7 and on
MIT Technology Review. So far, well over 350 "solvers" from all around the world have taken on this challenge, which will end, fatefully, exactly on my 50th birthday, on July 29.
I will be celebrating my first half-century in Venice: leaving Boston on June 7th and returning July 31st. Hopefully I will find more time to blog, now that
even Steve has started to...
