Final Presentations - Venetian Quality of Life

Today was the third day of presentations and it started with a high tide that surrounded our presentation location (the Spazio Mondadori, courteously provided by Giovanni Pellizzato, a founding member of the 40xVenezia).  Three teams presented an integrated presentation that reviewed the opportunities and challenges faced by Venetians from cradle to grave.  Despite the morning schedule - during office hours - the audience included people who were interviewed by the teams who came to see the results of the study on Young, Adult and Elderly Venetians.  The presentaions were very well received by those who attended, all of whom expressed their admiration for the "concise and visually impressive exposition" of the results of these projects. 

The unified presentation was extremely well-done despite the fact that 11 students were involved in a long sequence of almost 100 slides.  The graphics the teams produced were very exciting and innovative.  I'll post those once tehy are fully available on line.  

Even though these were complex and challenging topics, the preliminary results produced by the 3 teams came across very clearly and demonstrated an intriguing and persistent dichotomy in the way the primary quality of life ingedients play against each other.  In the words of the students, Venice seems to truly be a "City of two faces".  For example, although Venice provides a wide array of educational opportunities both in Vocational High Schools as well as at the University level, the employment opportunities are abundant only in the tourism and services industries.  So, although one can get a degree in Computer Science at Ca'Foscari, such a degree would almost guarantee that one would have to leave Venice after graduation.  There will be more explorations in these realms and hope to collaborate closely with the "40 per Venezia" on these exciting topics in the years to come.

Final Presentations - Origins of Venice

The third presentation this year (and the second today) was by the "Origins" team, which tackled three broad aspects that together would contribute tremendously to our understanding of the origins of Venice and its People:

1. The Archeology of Venice and its lagoons
2. The information content of Ancient Manuscripts in the Venice Archive
3. The genealogical provenance of the Ancient Veneti

I blogged on these before, but it was good to see the final product, which is being assembled into a single web site for ease of access (it should be completed by 12/19).  Once again, the students did a great job presenting this multi-faceted project, which will pave the way for many follow-ups in the years to come.   People in attendance included the principal archaeologist in Venice, Marco Bortoletto (featured as an avatar in many of the powerpoint slides),with his colleague Alberto Zandinella, plus Stefano Piasentini, a long-time friend and historian who spends much time prowling the Venice archive and who was one of the primary inspirers of the Manuscript Transcription Assistant concept. 

As previously explained, we have secured support for the DNA part of the project from the Genographic Project, which will enable us to contribute to confirming which of the main theories about the origins of the Venetians is more plausible.
For the other two major aspects,  the next steps are to get funding for the Archeology data harvesting system that this team designed, as well as funding to continue working on our uScript online emergent transcription crowdsourcer, which a couple of the team members (Shikhar and Viktoras) intend to turn into their own senior-year technical project (MQP).  I look forward to giving readers many more updates on these three ambitious and revolutionary approaches to the understanding of the genesis of Venice and its People in the years to come!

Final Presentations - Moving around Venice

The second day of presentations started off on the wrong foot when the Spazio Mondadori staff, who kindly hosted us thanks to the 40xVenezia organization, was unable to find the cable  that connected our laptop to the projector.  After some scrambling, an IT person showed up and found the cable in a closet and we were able to begin our first presentation on "Moving Around Venice" The display we saw was well worth the wait. The teams dazzled the audience with great results, truly killer graphics and magnificent animations, produced in part with the indefatigable assistance of our friend from Santa Fe, Steve Guerin.

San Filippo e Giacomo agents from Fabio Carrera on VimeoThe students showcased their work on intermediate secondary turning behaviors to further the development of autonomous agent models for Venetian boat traffic - as support for an interactive traffic simulation system supported by the EU Mobilis Project. They also discussed their methodological contribution to the development of a pedestrain model to help manage the city's plateatici (outdoor public spaces leased to restaurants).  In attendance were representatives of the City's mobility office, who manages boat traffic, as well as a representative of the Commerce Department who is in charge of the plateatici.  Needless to say the presentations were very well received.  Both models have a great chance of being adopted by the city in the not too distant future as tools for day-to-day management of both pedestrians and boats.

Immaculate Misconception

Leave it to Steve Guerin to know the factoid of the day... Contrary to my long-held beliefs due to my Catholic upbringing, which included going to a nun-run elementary school and a priest-run middle school, today I found out the real truth about today's holiday.  The Immaculate Conception does not (I repeat does not) refer to the Virgin Mary's conception of Jesus, after the angel announced the news to her.  What the Immaculate Conception actually refers to the conception of Mary herself!   The Wikipedia entry about this Catholic dogma is very clear about the misconception that many of us have about this holy day.  It clearly states that:

Her immaculate conception in the womb of her mother, by normal sexual intercourse, should not be confused with the doctrine of the virginal conception of her son Jesus.

The immaculate conception refers to the fact that She was born immaculate (without stain or sin) and our Holy Mary is therefore doubly immaculate, both at Her own birth as well as when She gave birth to Jesus while still remaining a Virgin.  

I am conducting an informal survey today to see how many Catholics actually know this fact and, so far, 100% of the sample has confirmed how widespread the misconception of the immaculate conception really is.  Amazing!  Thanks Steve!  

Immaculate completion

We are starting our last week tomorrow (Monday) which is a holiday here in Italy (the Immaculate Conception).  This miraculous event that happened 2009 years ago, allows us to use the day for final rehearsals of our presentations which will be taking place on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  The calendar of our presentations is posted on our wiki, together with a nifty embedded google map of the presentation locations.  We're wrapping things up and slowly migrating all of our results into project-specific web sites, such as the one our Origins team has been putting together.  One more week to go! Almost there...

Fun in San Marco

Many of you may have seen the video of the wakeboarder in Piazza San Marco.  One such video that caught our attention, since it was shown on Italian TV, contains the added bonus of an interview with Bethany Lagrange, one of our students here.

The video below, from YouTube, unveils the enigma of the mysterious surfer who is cruising really fast down Saint Mark's without a boat pulling him along.  The secret was a hidden (and very powerful) winching system!

Server Back Up!

Finally, today we got the Venice Server up and running again.  Our Venice 2.0 website is up, so are our Venipedia wiki, our picture gallery and even Dspace, our Venice repository and open archive. So, it took a few days, but we have fully recovered from the big flood and we're up and running just in time for the final week!  Also, as an aside, the server is not only back up, but it has been regularly backed up since before Thanksgiving, so we wouldn't have lost any data even if the server went under.  The Venice Anniversary is well protected thanks to the efforts of Saul Farber and Andrea Novello! 

Here's one more video for your viewing pleasure (keep in mind that this was shot when the tide had already receded for about an hour, when I was finally able to get out of the VPC).  You can find all videos here and all photos here.  Enjoy!

Strada Nuova Flood from Fabio Carrera on Vimeo.

Final Presentations - Visiting Venice

Our first final presentation by the "Visit Team"  today was a great success. The audience included Dr. Concato of the Tourism Department of the Venice Provincial Government (former sponsor of WPI teams when he directed the Venice Tourist Board (APT)), plus a representative from the Slovenian Government, interested in a partnership for a European Union project with Venice on the "Divertimi" program developed by the team, as well as two of our long-term collaborators, tour guides Laura Sabbadin and Bruno Nogara.  Unfortunately, our other key accomplices, Prof. Michele Tamma and his Ph.D. student Anna Moretti were busy with classes, otherwise all our primary contacts would have been there.

 The students did a great job in presenting their sophisticated proposal for a personalized web-based tour-planning system, based on individual and group profiles.  If it ever gets EU funding, and the final product is anywhere near as good as proposed, this will be reall "killer app" which I for one would love to use to plan my future trips!

The days after

After spending one day mopping, I spent today reconnecting all of the equipment and reshelving all of our books and project reports. We're still not quite done, since the server is still not reachable, due to a line problem, even though it is up and running normally inside the office.  The video below shows the situation outside the office about an hour after the peak of the tide, when I was finally able to get out and my knee-high boots were high enough to keep the water out.

Rio Dragan from Fabio Carrera on Vimeo.

Acqua Alta 2.0

Well… in this 20th anniversary year, we’ve just made it through the highest Acqua Alta (high tide) in twenty years (1.56 cm).  The fact that I am writing this blog entry is part of the good news…  I got at least one DSL line working.  We had about 6 inches of water in the VPC and for the first time we had water clear across the entire length of the office.  I spent all day mopping, but everything is spic and span now (I guess it needed a cleaning).  Once I got to the office (on foot due to the awesome timing of the concurrent boat strike),  I spent the first 3 hours trying to salvage 20 years worth of projects, plus all of our equipment. Then, I was trapped with no phone or internet, plus cell phones don’t work in the VPC, so there was a communication breakdown for about 4 hrs.  We had no phone nor internet until 6pm but both are back up again…  The server is down until we can get it restarted.  We will wait until tomorrow, since another high tide is forecasted for 11 am tomorrow (115 cm as of now, but they were wrong last night…).  I hope this won’t disrupt our week too much, but we’ll take it one day at a time. Here's one of my videos:
Acqua Alta in the VPC from Fabio Carrera on Vimeo.
I'll upload more videos tomorrow...