Posts tagged "University"

The graduate with his laurel crown and supervisor Alessandro Bogliolo.

Longtime friend, university colleague and more, Alessandro graduated two days ago from the University of Urbino.

He worked on an interesting application of genetic algorithms to an economic simulation. The results actually support monopoly as a winning economic model, so it can't be too wrong.

Anyway, congratulations!

And here below, a picture of the four of us who lived together in an apartment in Fermignano for two years. Fun times.

Lorenzo, Matteo, Alessandro and me.

In order to work at the InternetTV decoder project at the University of Urbino, I recently needed to setup a VPN connection to the university's network.

Installing OpenVPN on Windows 7 RC 64 bit is trickier thank expected. Fortunately I found an extremely helpful blog post that helped me out.

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During the last month I have been working again at the university of Urbino, on a project that involves other two graduates of the Computer Science faculty, Andrea and Saverio. The objective, for now, is to build an embedded InternetTV decoder which should work like a low power set-top-box able to reproduce digital HD video.

The project was presented yesterday at a conference here in Urbino about the future of television (i.e. InternetTV, of course, which is slowly taking hold here in the old continent). A representative from StreamIt attended, the main partner and most promising content provider in Italy.

Our set-top-box is being developed on a Beagleboard, a quite cheap board powered by a Texas Instruments OMAP 3530 processor which also includes a dedicated DSP chip particularly suited to decode multimedia streams. On the software side, the board is running on Ångström (a Linux flavor) and we have been implementing an RTMP client (the Adobe / Flash streaming protocol) and a player (based on GStreamer + QT + Mono). That's a lot of topics I'd like to blog about if I ever find some time.

Anyway, in the past days we had some euphoric moments when suddendly we were able to decode some largish videos (not HD, but still) using the DSP and with a CPU load of ~15%. After weeks of banging our collective heads against the board...

Watch on Vimeo.

The last days have been very interesting: first of all I went to Venice because of an exam (which I passed only in part), then attended La Biennale for a day and finally went to Milan in order to attend to an almost private presentation of "Risen".

First of all, the exam was about "System reliability and performance", i.e. stochastic processes and their modeling, queuing systems and finally about how to write a simulator and get statistically valid data out of it. Well, turns out that the simulator Silvio and I wrote wasn't too correct about the "statistically valid" part and we'll have to fix it in the next weeks.

Then, two days ago I was part of the film delegation of "It.Aliens" at La Biennale in Venice. Unfortunately, the showing was a technical Waterloo (audio and video were out of sync, the audio mix was completely wrong, etc.) but the audience laughed a couple of times so it wasn't a complete and utter failure, all in all. The festival was a great experience even if I stayed just for a couple of hours.

Finally, yesterday morning I woke up at 5 to catch a train to Milan - more exactly to Rho Fieramilano - where the Italian "Koch Media" headquarters are located. I met there with Leonardo "Sakkio", the leader of the Italian Gothic and Risen online community with whom I manage the official website Risen-Italia. Together we attended a nice preview of the new video game by Piranha Bytes, Risen, which is to be released in less than a month. We shot a couple of videos, which I'll start editing in the next days. The game looks pretty promising and we had fun testing it; the people at Koch Media also covered us in merchandising and stuff, which is always an easy way to make fan's heart happy!

Hello everyone, I'm back online after more than a month of silence. I've been busy with a couple of exams at the university: now I can gladly report that I have 3 (or let's say, 2 and a half) exams less to do and I'm dangerously close to getting my post-graduation in computer science.

The exams I passed were mildly interesting this time: one economy class (basic demand and offer models and such stuff), one advanced algorithms class and finally an exam about how to statistically estimate system performance and simulate them (in a significant way). I'm not quite finished with the last one, since I still have to write a simulation using JavaSim. Anyway, won't be too difficult I hope.

In the meantime I have been going on with ASP.NET MVC and some other interesting stuff: my list of "things to blog about" is growing and growing - I will try to catch up in the next days.

Yesterday I passed the exam in Logic Programming: a very interesting declarative programming style based on the foundations of mathematical logic.

Take this as a short, very vague, introduction: logic programming works by defining some logic clauses in your program and then applying a resolution algorithm on a particular query (the logical clause you are trying to "prove" according to logic inference rules). The logic interpret will then determine whether your query is a logical consequence of the program or not, i. e. the query is satisfied and a valid result was found.

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My friend Silvio and I passed another bunch of exams during the last summer session, here in Mestre. I got two thirties doing Data Mining and Distributed Systems, a (positively) unexpected 28 in Program Analysis and Verification and we passed the Programming with Components written test. Woot! By the way, Silvio also passed Security and therefore we're on par again.

We had also time to work on a little project of our and to play some Civilization 4. Now we're getting back home to enjoy some holidays at least before starting to study again for the next exam session in September...

Yesterday I registered the last exam of this, very satisfying, exams session. The count amounts to two 30 cum laude and a 27. Pretty sweet...

I moved to Mestre in February, in order to attend lessons at the university and to have more time for studying. It appears to be working, 'til now. I'm sharing an appartment with two girls from Sicily and a very friendly croatian giant, who happens to be a basketball trainer (besides working as an architect near Mestre). Living here will give me some time to work on my little projects on Codeplex and a big thing I'm working on with my friend Silvio...

On September 3rd and 6th I passed two exams at the University in Venice: Computability (a theory defining what is computable by a computer and what is not, very interesting) and Security (lots of cryptography, communication protocols, and so on). That makes 3 exams: not great, but hey...

Today has been a great day!
First of all some of my friends graduated in Computer Science at Urbino and I received the award as Best graduate student of 2006!