Intelligent Urban Agents

Readers of this blog may recall that one of my research themes, and the main driver of the intense collaboration with Steve Guerin and other Santa Fe folks, is the quest for a City Knowledge platform wherein each urban asset -- be it a fire hydrant, a light pole, a park bench, or whatever -- is uniquely identified by a birth certificate and is assigned a kind of "guardian angel" in the form of a software agent in the cloud.

After a quarter century (and hundreds of projects) working with cities around the world, I have acquired a thorough understanding about the fundamental services that municipalities provide to their citizens for maintenance, management and planning.  My MIT dissertation was a "reflection" upon the first 15 years of city work, and since then my goal has been to translate the CK theory into practice.
I am pleased to say that we are getting very close to having the first implementation of a real CK Platform, thanks to the efforts of my two summer interns: Neil Pomerleau and Ben Lichtner, who have been implementing what I had envisioned over a decade ago and have since been discussing and refining and experimenting with, in collaboration with Steve, who is fond of noting how often I say "It's In My Dissertation!" during our brainstorming and whiteboarding sessions at the treehouse.  The phrase has earned its own acronym: IIMD.
Now, after a flurry of sketches I was inspired to draw to explain the approach to the two interns, the same monicker can also stand for "It's In My Diagrams"!  Take a look at the cute agents with their hats and how they interact with each other...
Most of the ideas in my diagrams are going to be demonstrated in the ongoing project for the UNESCO Venice office.  Look for a blog when we are done!  Great stuff.
All of this will be illustrated at a workshop Steve and I are organizing with Vincent Corruble of the University of Paris (P&M Curie), where I presented some earlier ideas a couple of years back.
The workshop is entitled Intelligent Agents in Urban Simulations and Smart Cities and it is part of the ECAI 2012 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Montpellier, France at the end of August.  That will be our first venue to demonstrate with a "real" application what City Knowledge and AgentsCloud are all about.
Our intelligent urban agents will act on behalf of their respective urban assets and will communicate with other agents to maintain up-to-date information about the status of the asset, with the ability to issue alerts when critical situations are detected, based on publish-and-subscribe feeds coming from legacy systems, as well as from mobile apps or web reports.  Each asset is assigned an individual wiki page, where the information is immediately published and can thus be reviewed (and partially modified) by citizens and municipal officers.  Wait until you can see it with your own eyes!

Watch out for the "men in black", coming soon to a city near you!

ReTornado

I have returned to Venice, and so has a Tornado that last visited my home neighborhood of Sant'Elena 42 years ago, when my sister Barbara had just turned one and I was 9 years old.

Fortunately, yesterday nobody was really hurt though there was a lot of damage along the same exact route as its predecessor of September 11, 1970, which -- tragically -- killed 36 people in S.Elena, many of whom were in a public transportation boat about to dock here.
Together with the earthquake tremors from Modena that my mother Wilma (who is turning 75 this weekend) and I myself felt a few nights ago, this was another sobering reminder of the power of nature over our short lifespans, as I watch Cino (my father) and Wilma live the sunset of theirs...
But "ape-descended life forms" as we are, we are still "so amazingly primitive that we think [cellular phones] are a pretty neat idea".  And so we go on, here at the Venice Project Center, developing the latest app for the Venice Office of UNESCO, who has sponsored the two summer interns who will be here until July 16. One couldn't ask for better help: Ben Licthner, who just graduated from Brown U. in Physics and Creative Writing, was here in the summer of 2010 producing the ubiquitous ButOne Widget, which was the precursor of InptApp that the other Venice intern, Neil Pomerleau (a senior at WPI next fall), co-authored with Wesley Ripley after they had created the world-famous VeniceNoise app for their Venice IQP last fall.
This weekend, my son Nick will be joining us and he too will assist in the UNESCO project with his translation skills, as we clean up Venipedia and launch the Public Art app that I presented at the annual meeting of the American Institute for Conservation, in Albuquerque, shortly after the six Santa Fe Project Center projects were completed this past May.

Everything is connected in the circus of life in these "uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the [milky way] galaxy".  We are just a small part of the universal network, despite the importance we may attribute to our lives and ourselves.  Cycles and re-cycles occur and re-occur, and we are often but passive spectators to forces of nature beyond our control.
Our lives are too insignificant (in the bigger scheme of things) to be lived timidly.  What's the point of that?  Might as well be bold, lest a wayward tornado or an earthquake take us out of commission before we leave our mark (however tiny) on this, "mostly harmless", and "utterly insignificant little blue-green planet" of ours.

We plan to do just that this summer, by launching our City Knowledge platform, upon which the Public Art app as well as the PreserVenice web site will be based, in connection to the thousands of Venipedia pages dedicated to the material culture of Venice.
It promises to be a majorly disruptive technology in local Government, one of the four areas that web futurist Marc Andressen has identified as ripe for revolution.
Steve and I have put in our 10,000 hours, as Malcom Gladwell points out in Outliers, and we are poised on the brink of something important, which will allow me to scratch off one item from my life-bucket of Big Projects.  Another "baretta" on my (Facebook) wall.

Tumbling forward

After spending term C (Jan. 15- March 15) in Spencer, I've been in Santa Fe with 24 WPI students completing 6 projects on a variety of topics related to safe and efficient urban transportation, water conservation and renewable energy, including a project to preserve the indigenous language of the local pueblo of Pojoaque.  We're down to the last two-weeks and the final results are starting to appear in our newly-minted SantaFedia, the hyperlocal wikipedia which is for Santa Fe what  Venipedia is for Venice.
It's almost the end of April already, yet the ski season isn't over yet.  Together with Peter Small, Alistair McMullen and other ski pals, we closed down the Santa Fe ski mountain on April 1st (should have dressed like a fish...), then Taos on Easter Sunday, then Silverton, Colorado, last weekend.  Silverton's logo appropriately exemplifies the nature of the mountain -- and possibly the meaning of life in general.  It's all extreme terrain, served by a single vintage double chair, and avalanche equipment is mandatory.  The lift operators don't scan your pass, but instead "beep your beacon" before they let you on the chair...  It was snowing all weekend and we enjoyed well over a foot of fresh powder, which hid some of the razor-sharp stones that took a hefty slice out of my Watea skis and forced me to rent a pair of Hellbent K2 powder twin-tips.  The video below shows what happens when you don't listen carefully to the ski-rental technician when he says: "they're set to 8 which is the maximum legal setting.  You can get a screwdriver at the bottom of the chair to set them higher if you'd like..."  I missed the "nudge-nudge wink-wink" part of that piece of advice, so my binding kept popping out in the deep snow, as illustrated by the last frame of the video.  No biggie.  The tree was thankful to be relieved of all the weight of the snow.


Silverton Tree from Fabio Carrera on Vimeo.

Just yesterday, I skinned up Tesuque peak here in Santa Fe and skied down (once) with Peter Small.  It was my first time using skins and I had to borrow a pair of alpine trekker adaptors from Alistair to allow the heel to lift.  It took about 4 hours to do the whole roundtrip, but it was well worth it.  And let's not forget that the peak is at 4,000 meters of elevation and the trek involved almost 1,000 meters of vertical!
I've decided to unite my love for skiing with my yearning for travel and exploration, so this summer I plan to visit South America and ski the Andes with Nick (who is now on a much better trajectory in his life, after some turmoil around his 21st birthday on January 31).
No sense waiting for "the right time".
I will keep tumbling forward as gnarly-ly as I can before I get too old...

Bonne Ennui

It's a New Year and the winds of change are sweeping the slate and making it cleaner and cleaner. The tabula is being rasa.  Dead branches are falling.  Hats are changing, as Nick and I prepare to drive across the US and back to Massachusetts again.  The Venice projects are being wrapped up as the new Santa Fe projects are marching in.  Un altro giro di giostra.

I have had a few weeks of winter sports in Santa Fe, which helped rejuvenate the body and the mind. I saw the luminaria and the farolitos at Christmas, and ate healthy organic food with Nick and Simon every night.

Most importantly, I have thinned down the numerous initiatives on my plate to just the 10 most meaningful projects that I really want to pursue from here on down.  With this simplified life plan, I have gained a clarity of purpose that will make everything else easier.  I just hope Nick says good bye to his ennui and finds his purposeful life path as he turns 21 in a couple of weeks.

Now it's time to travel back to the East coast once more.

This promises to be a defining year.

Stay tuned.

The Solstice of an epoch

On this winter solstice -- the shortest and darkest day in the northern hemisphere -- I am starting the 51st winter of my life.  I like winters, but there is bias against them and against snow. It's raining today, and only a small minority of us would prefer it to be snowing...  In Italy, age is expressed in "primavere" (springs) not in "winter" units.
In Venice, we measure the passing of years in barette, which many of my fellow-citizens would instinctively associate with hats (i.e. winter clothing), but "cinquanta barette" probably refers instead to the hash marks a prisoner would carve on the wall of his cell, tracking the passing of a year with a short little bar, until -- after four -- the fifth diagonal strike would bundle a lustre.  I have lived 10 lusters, so I hope my 11th one can be illustrious and not as lackluster as its most recent predecessor has been for me.
It's been a while since I last updated this blog and lots has happened.
Most recently -- last week -- the 8 teams of WPI students who spent term B (October-December) in Venice with me, successfully completed their projects and returned to the States, as I have dutifully done myself.  I am in Spencer right now, about to go to Santa Fe, to be reunited with Nick, who has been rather distressed by his adolescent love life in his difficult transition to adulthood. We will be spending the holidays together and will return to New England in mid-January right before his 21st birthday.
As the sun has reached its lowest arc today, but will henceforth bring us longer and brighter days, so it seems that our society may be reaching its ebb point and we may be living through the solstice of an epoch, which may inaugurate a new era of global enlightenment. It just may be so, but it's hard to witness epochal transformations from within, though we all sense major change is happening all around us.
Will a global governance system emerge from the ashes of failed countries?  Will humanity graduate to a stable adulthood after such a troublesome adolescence?  Let's hope so.

Will I blog again before Christmas?  Hmmm...  I doubt it.  So...

MERRY CHRISTMAS to ALL!

And enjoy this time of solstice.

Furthur

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...

Street Bumps

It's been a bumpy road since the last blog entry.  I write this from Santa Fe after the end of the third quarter of classes (term C).  It seems that I can only find time to blog when WPI is on break these days.  Since the last blog entry, Nick and I were in Santa Fe once before, in early January, so I could set up the projects that are about to begin here next week, marking the official first term of operation of the WPI Santa Fe Project Center.
When we got back to Massachusetts a lot more happened to the car, to the castle, to Nick and to me, but I really don't want to continue with the litany of unfortunate events that have incessantly befallen our family since we left Venice back in December. Suffices to say that we're almost back to normal and happy to be away from Mass jinxes. Nick and I drove west once again for the annual pilgrimage to our Mecca and left the bumpy roads behind us.  Maybe it's the thin air, or the sunny vistas, or the elevation, or the people, but Nick and I really like to be back in Santa Fe.  It feels homey here.
Ironically -- and perhaps not so coincidentally -- this past month has also seen the announcement of the debut of StreetBump, our android app for the crowdsourcing of potholes in Boston, which I blogged about before.  The office of New Urban Mechanics of the City of Boston sponsored the app and announced it through a Boston Globe article on February 9, 2011, and the buzz caught on in major international websites (like Popular Science), as well as in very prestigious international technology blogs, such as Wired UK,  Slashdot (the Apple one!), Engadget and Techmeme, all the way to Il Sole 24 Ore, the main Italian business daily (the equivalent of the Wall Street journal in Italy).  Just today, I was interviewed for an article to appear on L'Organe, a francophone magazine in Montreal, Canada.  The list goes on...
Despite all the buzz, though, so far no journalist has caught on to the real innovation.  Everyone has been mesmerized by the mobile app, but the novelty here is not purely technological, but lies primarily in the crowdsourcing of the data, which allows us to not care about identifying the pothole on the fly, since we can statistically (or perhaps bayesianly) rely on the crowd to confirm its presence though repeat hits (or lack thereof) as more users travel the same roads over time.
The post-processing of our Street Bump data is non-trivial so there is going to be an Innocentive competition for the best algorithm to actually weed out the noise from the data and identify road anomalies.  With the upcoming Innocentive challenge, we are thus crowdsourcing the server-side post-processing and I am looking forward to seeing what "the crowd" can come up with. There is a total of $25K prize on this and I suggest that interested readers of this blog consider participating in the challenge.  Unfortunately, being one of the judges, I can't, which is too bad, because I think that Steve Guerin, Josh Thorp and I could probably come up with a good solution using entropy and other complexity techniques.  
In the meantime, the three of us have launched a new site called citizapps.com which may turn into a company once we have enough monetizable apps to justify it.  As part of our investment in the application, we will retain the IP (Intellectual Property) for StreetBump and will also have access to the winning algorithms from the Innocentive competition.  We will, however, release the current code as open-source, so in the end the whole project will be crowdsourced from "soup to nuts".
StreetBump has created quite a stir, but from my perspective it's a natural evolution of my PhD thesis on City Knowledge and all of the various WPI undergraduate projects I have advised in the past 20 years.  In fact, the original pothole mapper was a consequence of work we did in the early 2000's at the Venice Project Center, where I have been bringing WPI students since 1988, when we designed and built a "Moto Ondoso" (boat wake) measuring device for the City of Venice. The initial Pothole Mapper was a rather simple extension of the Moto Ondoso device, when I put on my "other" hat as Director of the WPI Boston Center...  It was a bulky device, with on-board GPS, accelerometers and a microprocessor, and lots of wires, all inside a weatherproof tupperware box.  This home-built Pothole Mapper device took three Major Qualifying Projects to complete, one of which was cited (first) in an MIT paper.  
More importantly, the original PotholeMapper caught the eye of Mayor Menino of Boston who wanted it installed in his SUV.  With the advent of smartphones, the StreetBump app was the logical next step in this decade-long evolution and it made sense that Mayor Menino would support its development, given its pedigree.   In fact, we may be going full-circle, since the gondoliers' guild in Venice has expressed interest in a modified version of StreetBump which will go back to its origins, by recording the moto ondoso that affects the traditional row-boats of Venice...  From wavy water to bumpy roads and back again. Wouldn't that be an appropriate final clincher to this project?   

Let's hope these apps make the waves and bumps settle down a bit.
Nick and I are ready for calmer seas and smoother roads as we settle into our healthier and most serene Santa Fe lifestyle.

When it snows, it pours

I need to add one more thing to the list of things we take for granted: our cars!
As a Venetian, I am almost ashamed to admit my dependency on wheels, but that is part of my split personality.  I just lived without a car for two months and didn't miss it one bit.  Now that I am back in Massachusetts, though, I can't live without it...  It goes with the territory.
The string of unfortunate events that started with the boiler failure, followed by the soot invasion and the loss of electricity in Nick's room, continues unabated.  On Christmas day, uncle Mark called to let me know that he had inadvertently backed into my car at Leslie's Christmas party.  I couldn't take a look at any potential damage, I told him, since Nick took the car immediately upon returning from the party.
The car hasn't been back in my driveway since.  It is currently sitting at the Subaru dealer, where it was slated for an oil change today.  One day too late, as it turns out.  Now, instead of changing the oil, I have to change the whole engine instead...
When it rains, it pours.  Actually, it has been snowing here for the past 24 hours. When it snows, it blizzards.

It would be way too easy to blame Nick for this additional, expensive surprise ($5k).  After all, the car conked out while he was at the wheel...  And he "should have" noticed the boiler had stopped working before I came home just 5 days ago.
There is no point in trying to find a culprit here, though.  It wouldn't change how things are right now.  One has to accept, and move on.  I must be shedding some bad Karma...  And lots of money that I really don't have.  Money that could have gone towards buying Nick his own car.  So he can have a job and learn the value of money.
Oh well. It looks like we'll be vying for the use of the same old car -- with a brand new engine -- when we return from Santa Fe.  Nick says he'll plow snow to repay me when we get back.  We'll see...

Now, I'm gonna book us a limo for Wednesday so we can leave this mess behind.
I'll deal with picking up the car when we return on January 15th.

Then I am going snowshoeing to clear my mind.
Then I'll hopefully jump into my neighbors' hot tub.
And try to forget these earthly woes.

Festina Lente!

Wrapping things up for Xmas

It seems appropriate that the next post after my homely homily of Thanksgiving should be one dedicated to the next big holiday.  It makes sense, given my academic calendar...  Things got really busy after I came back from the States following Thanksgiving break. Really really busy.

I am writing this entry on Christmas Eve, just after the annual holiday gathering with Jackie's family, aunts and uncles, brothers, sisters, parents and grandmother.  Nick and I were late, as expected.  This time we didn't abort the mission though, so we showed up two hours after the planned time, more or less nonchalantly.  And it was no big deal.  Nervous as I was, it was great to see all of these familiar faces of people who love us.  It made Christmas better this year.  Certainly better than the ghosts of Christmas pasts.  Today's Xmas party wrapped up a couple of years of awkwardness in my relations with Nick's grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.  I feel relieved about it.

Yet I can't help but also feel that this is a rather subdued Christmas season overall.  Families and friends still wrapped up presents for each other, yet it seems that the frenzy of holiday shopping simply wasn't there this holiday season.  Not in Italy for sure, and apparently not in the US either.  It must be the "economic crisis"...  Everyone's feeling the pinch.  And perhaps these tempi di vacche magre are making us more keenly aware of the extraordinary support network that our families really are.  It is probable that at least one out of 10 of us (or even 1 of 5) is currently benefiting from some form of economic support from our nonni, parents, siblings or relatives.  It's the ultimate "safety net" keeping our economy afloat...  Let us rejoice in our families and friends!  Let us be grateful when we can give support and when we can receive it.
This is the true spirit of Christmas, I think.

I flew back from Venice on Tuesday, the winter solstice, December 21st: the shortest day of the year.  Nick picked me up and drove me straight from Logan airport to a Planning Board meeting at Spencer town hall.  Being the chair of the board, I make special efforts to be there when meetings are planned, despite my hectic schedule.  It was about 9:30pm (3:30am according to my jetlagged body) when I finally got home. And the house was freezing cold.
The heat had failed.  

Nick thought it was due to running out of oil, so he called the emergency fuel service while I was at my meeting.  The van was making its delivery when I got home.  It soon transpired that indeed we didn't need any fuel at all, since we had enough already.  It was the boiler that had malfunctioned.  After trying unsuccessfully to repair it, the fuel company guy left and I called my boiler maintenance 24-hour service who attempted to repair the boiler as well.  By the time he left at midnight (6am in Italy) I had fallen asleep in my 43 degree bedroom.  When the boiler guy startled me out of my slumber, I came downstairs and engaged in a rather lengthy conversation with him speaking purely in Italian.  I even complimented him for how good his English was!  Only when he plainly said: "I don't speak Italian" did I finally snap back to the fact that I was actually in the US, in my freezing home in Spencer, and not still in Venice.  Very funny in retrospect.  Quite puzzling to the guy, I am sure.
There was nothing he could do to fix the boiler tonight.  They will be back first thing in the morning.  So I ended up sleeping in my electric blanket wearing the same clothes I had flown back in (plus a hat)...  The shortest day of the year was followed by the longest night, inevitably.  It felt like the coldest night too.  And, to top it all, we even had a lunar eclipse -- a rare cosmic event on the solstice, I am told.

All of these factors, combined with the heat failure, would seem to represent some sort of an omen.  There is a message here somewhere.  Something about taking things for granted.  Like heat in the house.  Or a moon in the sky.  Or even a family waiting for you at Christmas...  Perhaps the message is that earthly concerns are dwarfed by cosmic events (and vice versa).  And that neither of them is necessarily a big deal -- although they can be -- depending on how you look at what is.  Hmmm...

The next day, after showering at my neighbor's house, I still managed to have conference calls about the DEW and Bump projects and get my house inspected (now I can finally put walls back up in the kitchen!), while the technicians finally fixed the boiler and restored heat to the house, which, as I soon discovered, had been covered by a very fine, almost imperceptible, layer of soot that had somehow filtered upward from the basement into all of the kitchen and bath area, and beyond.  It would make the aethalometers we used in Venice go berserk!  Can't be too good for our respiratory tracts...

These unexpected emergencies were a lot more than I planned to deal with upon return, as I was also trying to wrap up the Venice projects that were completed just last Friday, which feels like it was a month ago.  Even though I slept with one on, it is amazing how quickly I changed hats this time... I will be wrapping up the Venice projects from Santa Fe, where Nick and I will be next Wednesday, December 29 until January 15.  I will cover this year's Venice projects in upcoming posts, once all of the results are in, as I transition to the upcoming Santa Fe Project Center season in 2011.

Meanwhile, now that the presents have been accepted and unwrapped, it's time to unwind a bit and enjoy this wonderful time of the year.  It is sufficiently snowy to qualify as a "white Christmas" (albeit barely) here in the hills of Spencer.  It was also white in Venice right before I left, just like when Nick was "born there", nearly 20 years ago.

This is indeed the most wonderful time of the year.  Enjoy it!

Buon Natale a tutti e a tutti una buona notte!

A thousand years of gratitude

Thanksgiving day has got to be one of the quietest days of the year, at least here in New England.  The fall foliage has been shed and the trees are bare.  You can see through the woods now, which is something that I have always found attractive for some reason. I just went for a walk around Wilson farm, just up Castle lane.  It was most serene out there.  Quieter than after a snow storm.  And a bit lonely. Everyone was indoors enjoying their turkey with family and friends. Except me... and all of the rest of the world.
In Italy, as well as everywhere else on the globe, this was just another Thursday.  So, why was I so sad?
I like Thanksgiving... It's my favorite holiday.  It exudes a certain peace and tranquility, a hominess and coziness, unadulterated by mass consumerism. It's a purer holiday and a more introspective holiday, unattached to specific creeds and unassailed by mandatory gift-giving and guilt-induced behaviors.  It's about family and friends. And food.  Lots of food.  Soporiferous food.
We had a great thanksgiving dinner in Venice last Thursday.  As is now customary, the 27 WPI students pooled their resources and produced a veritable feast at the Settemari clubhouse.  It was succulent.  The best yet -- as we say every year...  We were blessed by the presence of three generations of the Cocola family, with Jim's father and son Milo there together, with mother and grandmother as well.  I think this will be a memorable Thanksgiving for the Cocola family for years to come, even though Milo may not be old enough to really remember it later in life.
The day after this early celebration, I flew back to the US from Venice as I do every year, while the VPC students take their Thanksgiving break by flying all over Europe, from Ireland to Greece, to Spain and Germany and everything in-between.  Meanwhile, I just got done interviewing the students who will join WPI music professor Fred Bianchi and myself in Venice next fall. I expect we will have some interesting interactive musical projects in Venice next year!  I look forward to it.  I accepted 32 students (out of 48), and had to reject 16. I also interviewed and accepted all of the Santa Fe applicants, and co-advisor (and friend) Prof. Guillermo Salazar will help select the remaining 12 WPI students going to Santa Fe in the spring of 2012.
Last year, I had avoided Thanksgiving altogether, by flying to the UK after the WPI interviews to spend time with Adrian and his family in Oxford.  This year I had been invited by Natalie and Dave to spend Thanksgiving at their house in Paxton, but I also had the option of accompanying Nick to Thanksgiving with his mother and grandparents in Connecticut.  After some discussion and introspection I had agreed to join Nick in Connecticut with Jackie, her mother Ellie, grandmother and granddaughter Irenes, as well as Jackie's siblings Ken, Jim and Leslie, with their respective spouses.  As seems customary in my family, Nick and I couldn't get our act together quickly enough to make it to CT in time for the family dinner.  So, I decided to abort the mission and sent Nick to show up late for the meal "by shelp".  I regretted it afterwards, but I guess this type of family reunion is just too much for me to handle, still.  Too many memories...  Jackie stopped by later and we made plans to spend Christmas together as a family to make up for this year's debacle.
I am grateful for this thanksgiving holiday this year.  It has shown me again -- as if I needed confirmation -- what truly matters to me most.  Family and friends are indeed our greatest treasures.  As I already had a chance to write before, and even though I have expressed my gratitude to my family, mentors and friends from time to time, giving thanks is a habit that one must practice continuously, relentlessly and authentically.  Indeed, as the cartoon above says, one day a year is hardly enough to cover the thousands of thanks we ought to be profusing on our fellow men and women on a daily basis.
So, thank you all, Nick and Jackie, friends and family, colleagues and students, partners and mentors for all you have done to make my world what it is... which is great indeed.

Grazie Mille!