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!

Tempus Fugit

Time flies when you're having fun... Or when you just simply get busy, as I am prone to do from time to time.
I guess the start of the academic year at WPI has put a real damper on my blogging... Sorry about that.  Three months have passed since my last entry and -- of course -- lots has happened in the meantime.
Where to start?  There is no way I can summarize everything in this entry, so I will just hit the highlights and will fill in the details later.  First of all, let me say that I am writing this from Venice, where I have returned since the last blog entry which I wrote from here.  I am sitting in the NEW Venice Project Center office, which is far better than the legendary VPC of yesteryear.  We are now on the "other" side of the Grand Canal (de ultra as our ancestors would say), near the Rialto market, on the Fondamenta de le Tette, whose translation is unsuited for underaged readers of this blog. Suffices to say that it has to do with the "oldest profession in the world".
Since August, Nick and I have returned to the US where he started his studies at Quinsigamond College in Worcester.  I am very proud of him for getting himself on the college track, which, among other things, also involved getting his driver's license.  These are major milestones for Nicolo', veritable rights of passage that mark the relentless trajectory of our lives.
While Nick stayed back on Castle Lane to get ready for his new life as a full-time student, I managed to go sailing quite a bit: first with Jonathan a couple of times, then with my MIT advisor Joe Ferreira and finally with my WPI friends Dave and Natalie.  I also traveled to Santa Fe twice to set up the 6 projects for the first full contingent of 24 WPI students who will spend term D at the newly minted Santa Fe Project Center (SFPC) with me and former provost John Orr.  I enjoyed living in Steve Guerin's former home overlooking "the city different", with our Croatian guests from GIScloud (Marko and Dino), whose "google docs of GIS" was well received at MIT and deserves a separate blog entry of its own.  I had fun with my friends there while I got a lot work done and was invited back during term A to give a presentation to the statewide Metropolitan Planning Commissions meeting in September.  Steve and I have proposed a major project to the NM State Transportation Commissioner, which promises to transform mobility into a full-fledged utility -- like water or electricity -- with end-of-the-month billing for one's transportation usage...
Revolutionary.

I had to leave Nick in Massachusetts on his own, while I spend term B in Venice with 27 WPI students, who have been working on seven very challenging and important projects for my hometown since October 24:

1. The redesign and release of Venipedia - the hyperlocal wikipedia for Venice we created in 2008
2. The continuation of our DNA project on the origins of the Veneti (or Venets as some call us)
3. The creation of PreserVenice - a non-profit for the preservation of Venice's material culture
4. The assessment of the impacts of Cruise Ships on Venice and its inhabitants
5. The re-measurement of canals, to see what changed in the 15 years since our initial UNESCO studies
6. The creation of a pedestrian model for the city with a mobile app to catch the elusive vaporetti
7. The study of the evolution of Venice's retail sector since WWII

Each of these projects warrants an entry of its own, which I will put together once some final results begin to emerge.  For now, click on the links above to take a look at each team's web page.
Since I've been here in Venice, a lot has happened as well.  I've driven to Ljubljana (Slovenia), which is a mere couple of hours from Venice, and I managed three important meetings there: (1) a lecture at the University of Ljubljana's Dept. of Electrical Engineering thanks to our old contact from the failed Divertimi EU project, Marko Tkalcic, (2) a dinner with Robi Petric who runs the veneti.info web site and is eager to collaborate in our quest for the genetic origins of the Veneti, and (3) a pick up of 2 portable aethalometers from Grisa Mocnic of Aerosol thanks to the kindness of VPC alumn Jeff Blair and of Tony Hansen of Magee Scientific.  These instruments have been monitoring emissions from cruise ships since I returned from my overnight trip to Slovenia.
Shortly after that, we had a weekend visit from Evie Ansel, who is helping with our project to restore traditional Venetian watercrafts, and who also had the fortune to participate in a one-of-a-kind orienteering race by row boat on the canals of Venice, courtesy of the glorious Settemari aeno-ludo-gastronomic association.  Even though we placed 8th out of 10, we did well and had lots of fun finding the culinary check points in the meanders of Venice's waterways that I know so well.
Right now, I am hosting my freshman year roommate from WPI, Ruudje Arends and his son Jake who is studying in Amsterdam, the Venice of the North.  Even though we all support Pitura Freska's desire to turn Venice into the Amsterdam of the South, the connection with Holland is that Jacob Rudolph Arends III and the IV are from Aruba, which is part of the Netherland Antilles, so they are actually Dutch nationals.  Sadly, Jacob Rudolph Arends Jr., Rudy's dad, died just days before this long-planned trip, so we're doing our best to make it a merry occasion.  I hadn't seen Rudy for a quarter century and it's been great to catch up with him.  He just left today.  We are going to reconvene in Amsterdam with Joe Moreau on 11/11/11 for the 30-year reunion of the famed IAO - Italo Aruban/American Organization.  It's already in my calendar.
Thursday, the students will cook the traditional Venice Thanksgiving dinner, one week early, at the Settemari clubhouse.  It's a great way to mark the midpoint of the term, before the long holiday break next week.
At the end of this week (Friday), I fly back to the US for Thanksgiving week, so I can interview 48 WPI students who would like to come to Venice next year, plus 12 who want to go to Santa Fe in 2012.  Despite my best efforts to dissuade perspective students from applying en masse, Venice is still one of the most attractive of WPI's global project centers.  Santa Fe also is the most popular of WPI's domestic centers. I will pay the price of such popularity by interviewing 60 students in three days starting next Monday -- a non-stop marathon from 7am to 10pm, with a student every half hour...
But I will get to see Nick and that will more than make up for it.  I really miss the man. We spent so much time together for the past couple of years that it's hard to not see him for a whole month.

As usual, I have a lot of irons in the fire, but I am managing to keep things from getting too hectic.  And I am squeezing in some fun times in there as well, as I am apt to do.

Nevertheless, even when one tries to live in the now, "clock time" ticks away incessantly...

Until the next now...

Shady business (Venice 3D)

After the recent release of the Google Sketchup 3D buildings for the entire city of Venice, all kinds of possibilities are opening up for us at the Venice Project Center.  We could map our numerous GIS layers onto the 3D city, as Kyle has done with our fountains dataset, but we can also start to attach information to each building as the fascicolo del fabbricato has never been able to really do.

More interestingly (albeit possibly less usefully), we can perhaps exploit the underlying 3D models to produce three-dimensional applications that we could only dream of before.  Steve and I toyed around with the idea of visualizing building data by projecting infographics onto the physical 3D model of Boston and even went as far as proposing a 3D, head-tracking, single-person viewer of a virtual 3D model of Boston.  I wonder if these are now feasible in Venice.  It may be great fodder for a fall IQP.  I'll have Ben check into the actual programmatic possibilities.
During the recent heat wave in Venice, I found myself walking around the city while purposely hugging walls and traipsing only where there was a cooling shade.  Some campi, like S. Maria Formosa and S.Zanipolo are mostly shadeless, and difficult to bypass without stepping out into the scorching sun, but I somehow managed to weave myself a variety of paths - variable depending on the time of day and the corresponding sun angle.  It made me think that a mobile app to steer one on the shadiest route would be "really cool" (pun intended).  Since in Venice we call a glass of wine an ombra, this app could appropriately steer wary travelers and locals alike from shade to shade by mixing the 3D projection algorithms of ambient pixel and redfish and the Google 3D buildings, while providing the location of "watering holes" both for water fountains (a la Kyle) or for wine and cicheti at the local bacaro.  It would be an interesting and marginally useful novelty that may steer tourists off the beaten path and into some of the more authentic parts of Venice...

Maybe we can combine it all with a Venitude app that might also buzz and divert the traveler when near places of interest, like public art or a visitable church or museum, as we have proposed in our Divertimi project with the EU, which we are still waiting to hear about.

Venetian DNA: a first look

Readers of this blog may recall several posts over the years concerning our quest to trace the origins of the Venetians using DNA analyses (type "dna" in the search box on the right of the blog to see them all) . There are competing theories and references to the legendary origins of the Veneti (or Enetoi?).
We're either originally from Paphlagonia, or from Lusatia (Poland) and we may or may not be related to the Veneti of Gaul (Britanny) mentioned by none other than Julius Caesar (see detailed map online). Since we learned that a study of DNA haplogroups may shed light on these hypotheses, we launched our Venice DNA Project in 2008.
The idea for the project was born in 2004, after I read  an article on the Phoenicians in National Geographic magazine. I bounced around the idea with WPI faculty colleagues for a while, until my happenstance stumbling upon a brief mention of the Genographics project in Wired magazine in 2007, which lead to my decision to begin exploring the topic in 2008.  That fall, thanks to the enterprising team of WPI students, we began our collaboration in the Genographics Project, collecting our first sample from my mentor Count Marcello, and continuing the collection in the fall of 2009, with the last team of WPI students studying the Origins of Venice and its inhabitants.
You may also remember the big flurry of media attention that we inadvertently attracted to this project in conjunction with the Funeral for Venice of venessia.com.  We are hoping that the release of our results will quell any leftover smolders from that overblown controversy.  This past May, the Genographics project released the results of the DNA analyses conducted on the 156 Venetian cheek-swabs we had sent to the Unitat de Biologia Evolutiva of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.  After two years of work, we were finally able to look at the DNA evidence which Kyle faithfully tallied up for a first look at where we stand, his Canadianess betrayed by the use of French labels in the maps. Out of  the 156 samples we collected, 57 were not viewable on the Genographic site for one of two reasons: 34 were Invalid (not enough DNA?) and 23 others (labeled Faulty in pie chart) simply failed to show up on the site.  We have initiated an inquest on these issues and we are hoping to retrieve at least some of these unusable samples.  "In the end" (as Adrian is fond of saying), the total number of valid samples thus far is 99.  Two thirds of these (66 out 99) show the genetic pathway in the map above, which we are told is a very typical "European" trace (blue pie slice), which confirms that Venice has been a melting pot, rather than the home of a distinct gens. Ironically, my DNA (probably of Spanish origin), that of my brother-in-law Alberto Gallo (clearly a Gaul)  and Kyle Miller's (a Canadian of British descent) all had the same exact lineage, which we shared with the overwhelming majority of other participants as shown in the map at the top of the post.
 Of more interest to me are the two sets of samples which show a path through the Balcans (labeled "Greek" in pie) and perhaps the most intriguing one which I labeled Paphlagonian in the google chart, which looks like the map down here. Unfortunately, only 6 of our samples display this genealogical profile, which skirts all four of our main target areas: Trebizond, the Veneto, Britanny and the Baltic.  A DNA pattern that could reconcile all theories and references in the literature... hmmm!
While I was in Barcelona in June to visit Prof. David Comas, I perchance met a young Polish researcher, Krzyszof Rebala, who - by pure luck - happens to be focusing his attention on the Venedi of Poland, which he has thoroughly studied without finding any distinguishing trait to clearly separate them from other European populations.  So far then, the Venetians we sampled  do not seem to have any really striking DNA patterns nor do they seem to be related to the Wends of Lusatia, which paradoxically might give fuel to the controversial Venetic theory of a pre-celtic settlement of Veneti across the heart of Europe.
Since the Genographic project is slated to wrap up next summer, I discussed with Dr. Comas the options we have left to complete our research project.  Here is the plan I sketched out in Barcelona:

1. Collect another 100 samples in small villages in the Veneto hinterland to seek out purer DNA strands for the ancient Veneti of NE Italy
2. Collect 100 samples in Paphlagonia, near the Turkish city of Trebizond, with the help of Jeremy Chapman, whom I met in Istanbul in June
3. Collect 100 samples in Brittany where the Armorican tribe of seafaring Veneti (aided by Asterix's own tribe, I am sure) put up a good fight against Caesar's navy in the battle of Morbihan
4. Then match all these samples with the samples that Krzyszof has collected in Poland and see what, if any, match we may find across the four geographical areas.

I think these are challenging but interesting follow-ups that are worth pursuing, but the logistics are tough (and possibly costly).  We could definitely use some grant support to pull it out.  This may well be the mission we assign to this year's Origins team.  We shall see what happens.
More details on our results and on the final plans for this project in an upcoming post.

A Mediterranean "tour de feu"

After finally arriving in Venice on June 13 and welcoming the arrival of Ben Lichtner (the Brown intern from Santa Fe I mentioned in a recent post), Nick and I quickly departed again for a whirlwind (working) journey around the Mare Nostrum.

But first we spent some time with the nonni (Wilma and Cino), the zii (Barbara and Alberto) and the cuginetti (Barnaba and Samuele), met some friends and business associates, moved into our semi-habitable house and enjoyed some homemade nonna meals.
It was a brief but welcomed respite before Nick and I embarked on another epic coast-to-coast voyage, this time from the Western coast of the Mediterranean (Barcelona) to the Eastern one (Istanbul), and across the Aegean from Kos (Greece) to Athens (after navigating our way through Santorini and Ios).  Barcelona was wonderful, as was Istanbul, in different ways.  Nick and I were in Barcelona alone, then were joined by Laura Sabbadin in Turkey with whom we drove through Thrace and the Aegean coast of Anatolia down to Bodrum (ancient Halicarnassus, an ok place, hence yellow on map), hitting Troy (disappointing: red on map), Pergamon (good: green) and Ephesus (very good).  We were all positively impressed by the hospitality of Turkish people. Nice!

Ben Lichtner caught up with us in Kos (not so good = yellow) and tracked back with us all the way to Athens (disappointing/red), by way of Santorini (good) and Ios (even better).  The markers with a black dot on the map signify overnight stopovers. We had fun adjusting to each culture, language and food, at times feeling like real tourists (i.e. slightly overcharged for inferior food or taken advantage of by suspicious taxi drivers), but generally adapting to the local mores with unexpected ease.  The trip had three work-related stops, each of which will be the subject of future posts .

1. In Barcelona, I finally met Prof. David Comas of the Unitat de Biologia Evolutiva of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra whose research group has analyzed the 166 DNA samples of Venetians we collected in 2008 and 2009 for the Genographic project.  We discussed a joint research project.
2. In Istanbul, we met Jeremy Chapman, a recent WPI graduate and friend of Kyle's, a turcophile who has been living in Constantinople for a while and will be helping us organize future DNA collections in the Trebizond area of northern Turkey -- formerly known as Paphlagonia -- where the Veneti (or enetoi) are supposed to be coming from, according to authoritative, albeit not-necessarily-reliable, sources such as Homer, Titus Livius and Strabo.
3. In Kos, Greece, Ben and I were the last (dulcis in fundo or cherry-on-the-cake) presentation at the second annual WIT conference on the Modelling, Monitoring and Management of Forest Fires. The sandtable demo that Ben put together on the fly (after learning that Steve couldn't make the trip) awed and inspired the audience several of whom may follow-up with Simtable.

Since our flight back to Venice left from Athens, we were forced to visit the disappointing capital of Greece, whose only redeeming qualities, besides the Acropolis and the Archelogical Museum, is the absolute must-see of any Athenian tourist: the changing of the guards (every half hour or so) in front of the Greek υπουργείο of ανόητος  περιπάτους, which probably inspired the eponymous Monty Python's skit (or viceversa)...

Teşekkür-ler!  παρακαλώ!  Chencooyi!  Yakshemaz!

Oxford Energy Futures

After leaving the US on June 6th, Nick and I first stopped in Oxford, UK, where we spent a week at Rawlinson road with Kseniya, Adrian, Masha and Kiril (Karen was away in France on a wine-gathering tour).
While Nick enjoyed the local skateboarding scene, Adrian and I prepared for our joint lecture at the Oxford Energy Futures conference hosted by the Oxford University CPD center at Rewley House.  The conference was really interesting, spanning the gamut from wood-derived energy to nuclear fusion and everything in-between - solar, wind and tide energy being still the primary technologies of promise.
Our dual presentation was very well received, especially the Energence web site demo by Adrian and my shameless plug for Bump which entailed handing the Droid phone I got from Google I/O to the audience so they could shake the phone and see the beautifully hypnotic accelerometer display that Josh Thorp endowed the application with.  We met a number of notables at the conference and it appears likely that Adrian and I may be invited back to lecture at Oxford in the fall.  Quoite Noice!

I also made time for a bit more work on our Energence enterprise, which (in a nutshell) is a company that Adrian and I founded to allow municipalities to monitor compliance with CO2 emission targets, based on the  "Merton Rule", which is named after the London Borough of Merton, where Adrian and I concocted the idea of a "Merton Gauge" while he was the chief environmental officer there and I was advising a team of students from WPI, while on a stint at the WPI London Project Center. The Merton Rule is now a national standard adopted by all local governments in the UK and Adrian Hewitt, FRSA, is Mr. Merton Rule (also known as "the green evangelist").  In abidance to the Merton Rule, new buildings throughout Great Britain now have to produce 10-20% of their energy on site, using renewable technologies, in order to contribute to the abatement of the carbon footprint of the town as mandated by a national law.  Energence provides a simple, web-based system that makes it possible for city officials to check whether these installations actually meet their targets once the buildings are occupied and the renewable equipment is in operation.
Together with Constantin Windisch-Graetz, our chief financial officer who happens to be the descendant of a Styrian prince, Adrian and I traveled to Beaconsfield (inexplicably pronounced Baconsfield, a feature of British language that continues to puzzle those of us who aren't native speakers) to discuss municipal leasing programs with Ken Hunnisett and David Cranmer of Cranmer & Lawrence.
The confusingly palindromic duo of Chris Martin and Martin Watson of EMC (the Energy Monitoring Company) who are providing us the hardware necessary to monitor energy production (and soon consumption too) at our building sites (appropriately starting in Merton, of course) were also in attendance at C&L.  Given the potential for a huge demand for these web-addressable, GPRS energy data loggers, we are discussing with EMC how to ramp up production and streamline installation.  Later in the week, I also finally met Ed Cotterill, our chief of operations, who had replaced Adrian as the chief environmental officer in Merton, after Adrian left for the private sector.  I think we have a very good and complementary team of people who are also fun to be with and pub-worthy.
Our initiative is shifting into high gear and picking up some real momentum. On this very day, a short month after Nick and I spent that week in Oxford, Adrian, Constantin and Ed are hosting a major workshop at the City of Westminster on Victoria Street, London. Half of the boroughs of London are in attendance, as well as representatives of the Energy Saving Trust (EST), the Local Government Association (LGA) and the acronymically anagrammatic Greater London Authority (GLA).  Down in Santa Fe, Redfish -- or more accurately John Guerin (Steve's dad) in Phoenix, Arizona -- has put in extra time to make sure that we have as many devices as possible on line in preparation for the event, which could be a major turning point in our own Oxford Energy Future.

In bocca al lupo!