Venice 2.0

the President visits Venice!

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:56:00 +0000

It's official!

The President is coming to Venice this fall on an official visit! He will be bringing a message of Hope and Progress for our beleaguered city that this week has seen its population drop below the 60,000 mark.

Could this visit inspire us to look for real alternatives to the mass tourism economy that monopolizes our lives? Could Venice really become the new capital for "immaterial production" as was once again discussed at "Venezia Camp 2009" this past weekend? Or are Venetians doomed to extinction as many fear? Are we going to become mere amusement park entertainers hired by Disney to give visitors a verisimilitude of authenticity?

Are we expecting too much of our president?

We shall see.

President Berkey of WPI will be hosting an alumni event in Venice on Thursday November 12, 2009, to mark the end of our 20th anniversary celebrations. He will be in attendance, together with his wife Cathy and Dexter Bailey, WPI's Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations.

This is the first time a WPI president visits the Venice Project Center, so it will be an honor for us to have a chance to show him, and all alumni who will attend the event, what we have accomplished in our twenty-one years of operation since the distant 1988, when we humbly started our quest to "leave Venice better than we found it". I think we can confidently say "Yes we did!" and, with his influence and stature, we also hope that he can help ignite the next phase of our pursuit for a lasting legacy in my hometown: Venice 3.0. A new era of applied research for Venice, based on the solid foundation of knowledge that we have established thus far. A legacy that will hopefully outlive me... and the president.

Can we inspire a radical new direction of progress in this gem of human artistry and engineering and inject new hope in its dwindling population?

Yes we can! (and we will...)

(Obamicon of Pres. Berkey courtesy of Kyle Miller)

All prepped and ready to blog

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:37:00 +0000

Today marked the arrival in Venice of 27 WPI students who will be here until December 19. It is the final group to officially mark the end of our protracted, multi-year 20th anniversary celebrations. As indicated in my blog entry at the beginning of the preparation term, these teams are tasked with completing some long-standing project themes, as well as with breaking some new grounds to set the stage for the next 20 years of projects in Venice.

The students have moved into their apartments, which are located in the more "Venetian" sestieri of Castello and Cannaregio and they have probably already had their first gelato and panino... (and who know what else?). Having learnt our lesson from last year's flood, we did not rent any apartments on the ground floor this year...

It is always fun to see the wide-eyed students, finally setting foot in the city they have been reading and studying about for the past two months. Venice is such a surreal place... even for me.

Tomorrow, we'll have our first group meeting at the Settemari club, and then the projects will begin in earnest. We have an exciting array of topics this year, all of which have been blogged about by the respective teams as they prepared their project proposals back in Worcester.

I will dedicate a new blog entry to each project in the days to come, as the teams zero in on the full spectrum of activities to accomplish their respective missions.

Lost in translation - being Italian in America

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 03:39:00 +0000

Last week, I was invited to speak at a conference in New York City, organized by ILICA (Italian Language Inter-Cultural Alliance). The full title of the conference was "Saving Venezia & Protecting New Orleans. The MOSE project. The debate surrounding Italy's most innovative technology." and it was held at the Manhattan campus of St. John's University. The proceedings were punctuated with a series of sumptuous meals prepared by imported Venetian chefs from the Trattoria Bissa da Rocco in Mestre, coordinated by Andrea Tiberi, an Eatalian chef operating a successful wine bar in New York.

Two thousand pounds of fresh fish and other products (like radicchio chioggiotto) were flown in from Chioggia for the event. The mayor of Chioggia, Romano Tiozzo, accompanied the cargo shipment to personally ensure that it arrived safely to the event. He was not the only notable present at the conference. We had the pleasure to meet the Italian Consul General in NYC, Francesco Maria Talò, and the ambassador's advisor Alberto Gallucci, and heard the voice of the mayor of Salinas, CA, the American capital of radicchio production. The conference was hosted by Cav. Vincenzo Marra, president of ILICA, and Prof. Anthony Tamburri, Dean of the John Calandra Italian American Institute.

In the quarter century that I have spent in the U.S., I never really had much of chance to interact with Italian-American institutions. I always thought that they were the province of Americans of Italian descent, but not for "true" Italians like me. Meeting the members of ILICA, I was surprised to find out that many of them were actually born in Italy -- as I was -- and had lived in the U.S. for most of their adult life -- as I have. Just last week, I renewed my "green card" (which might explain the "green again" in my enigmatic tweet) and was re-awakened to the fact that I am an alien in a country that I consider "home"... I discovered that my green card had expired while trying to embark in a flight from London back to my home in Spencer, Massachusetts, this summer. I was traveling with my son Nicolò, who could get onto the flight with no problems, because he has an American passport (despite having been born in Venice like me). This bureaucratic snafu, combined with the recent controversies surrounding my role as chair of the planning board in Spencer have convinced me that I should apply for citizenship in the country where I have spent the majority of my adult life (i.e. become "evergreen" as I obscurely stated in my tweet). Meeting the members of ILICA made me realize that I really am "one of them" for the first time in my life, and the outcome of the conference confirmed that I am really more American than I thought...

Given the subtitle of the conference that explicitly mentioned the "debate" surrounding the construction of the MOSE project, I though it would be useful to elucidate for the audience the nature of the controversies that accompanied the project for three decades. Despite having made clear both in the slides (below) and several other times during my remarks (which were fortunately videotaped by i-Italy cameramen) that I was simply relating the history of the opposition to the project, which have all been resolved (as I repeatedly stressed), and not presenting my personal views, those who did not speak fluent English in the audience were left with the impression that I was personally against the MOSE project. Very unfortunate indeed...

Ironically, the very last question I emailed to Prof. Tamburri, as I was preparing my slides, was whether they were expecting me to present in Italian or in English. Given the name of the hosting institution, it was a legitimate question, and Prof. Tamburri replied that I should present in English. As it turns out, this was probably a fateful decision since what transpired at the conference clearly indicated that my presentation was "lost in translation" due to language barriers on the part of the delegation from the Consorzio Venezia Nuova (CVN) and the Magistrato alle Acque, headed by Mr. Patrizio Cuccioletta. Their vehement reaction with ad hominem attacks to my personal and professional integrity left me and others in the audience stupefied. It was embarrassing display of unwarranted defensiveness on the part of those who were invited to the conference to represent the "best" that Italy has to offer as far as cutting-edge engineering.

Given the tenor of my presentation, where I actually praised them for their technical skills (slide 10) and expressed clearly that the controversies were "resolved", as well as my faith in the effectiveness of the barriers to achieve what they were designed for (slide 31), it should have been amply clear that my intentions were purely informative.

Quite naively, in retrospect, I was hoping to incite discussion that would take us "beyond" this project to solve the outstanding issues that are of concern to average Venetians like me (slides 73-104), by expressing my hope that we could devote a commensurate amount of attention and funding to these other pressing challenges, thus creating opportunities to develop levels of expertise that could be exported to the rest of the world as the CVN is doing already in its field. These important discussion points were completely waylaid by the puzzling rebukes proffered by Mr. Cuccioletta and Mrs. Brotto, who seemed to be responding to some "other" presentation to those who followed and understood where I was coming from with my remarks.

Although I did not really take personally any of the comments that were made, I was truly disappointed at the missed opportunity for a real "debate" about these matters of crucial importance to Saving the Venetians. While one could possibly understand the obsequious deference to the prestige of the Venetian authorities on the part of some of the spectators, some "neutral" English-speaking members of the audience also seemed to have gotten the message wrong, and were thus intent to "shooting the messenger", despite my repeated re-statement of the informational (and impersonal) nature of my historical retrospective on the vicissitudes of the project. I will leave the readers of the blog to draw their own conclusions based on the included slide show.

It is disconcerting to me that my crucifiction on the altar of full disclosure ended up sidelining the excellent presentations by Marylou and Jerome Bongiorno and John Day, whom I hold in high esteem. The Bongiornos were instrumental in getting me invited to this conference, after having met me at the Wingspan workshop they organized for the development of their WaterMark film project in 2005, where I also met John Day, who presented to us the similarities and differences between the New Orleans and the Venetian situation. I also fear that the knee-jerk reaction that we all witnessed may have marred the potential for future collaborations between the Venice Project Center and ILICA, especially as a potential sponsor of our planned descent of the Hudson and circumnavigation of Manhattan with Venetian row boats in 2012.

All in all, this experience has cemented in my mind the fact that I am really more American than Italian at this point: truly an "American Italian", i.e. an Italian who has been americanized, which is slightly different from being an Italian American, i.e. an American of Italian descent. Regardless of the labeling, we all have more in common with each other than with Italians who only come to America to visit and are unfamiliar with the nuances of the American language, as well as with the spirit of open debate and transparency that are parts and parcel of American culture. It seems to me that to avoid embarrassing diplomatic incidents in the future, Italian Americans (and American Italians) should create a counterpart to ILICA, which we may want to name ELICA, an institution that will promote the diffusion of English Language to help Italians understand the Culture of America.

Having spent the last couple of years to fully release all of our 20 years of research for Venice through our Venice 2.0 anniversary initiative, I think ELICA may be just what we need to propel us together into this new era of open discourse and away from the closed-minded provincialism that is so 1.0 and has prevented the Italian genius from shining again in the world spotlight for far too long.

Wood Boat Mainiacs

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:05:00 +0000

Thanks to the extraordinary hospitality of my friends Anne Witty and Jonathan Taggart, I have had the luxury of sailing in Maine for two beautiful long weekends this month. I had forgotten just how wonderful the Maine coast really is, with its archipelago of granite mountaintops covered with hardy pines. It's truly like sailing in the valleys of the Dolomites long before the last Würmian glaciation that created the Venice Lagoon. The last time I had done that was about 25 years ago when captain Scoop (Paul McAskill) and I "sailed naked" (meaning with no instruments - it's too cold to remove your clothes up there) from Boothbay to Acadia national park.

Given that there are at least two plausible claims that the Mondo Novo (at least the Northern part of the continent later named after another Italian -Amerigo Vespucci) was discovered by Venetians before Columbus, either in 1398 by the Venetian brothers Antonio and Nicolò Zeno, or in 1497 by Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), all of whom are thought to have landed somewhere Down East, it was fitting that I should bring a gonfalone of Saint Mark to be flown on Nereid's mast on our voyages up and down the very same coasts that my fellow Venetians first viewed 500+ years ago.

I met Jonathan, who is a heritage conservator specializing in bronze objects, in 1996, when I gave a talk at the National Institute for Conservation in Washington DC, following which he joined me for a couple of Earthwatch "expeditions" in Venice, when we were cataloging and (thanks to him) restoring wellheads and bells across the city. Anne has been a curator for several maritime museums, including Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria, Oregon, and, more recently, for the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine.

Given their backgrounds, and their love for Venice, it is not surprising that our sailing trips generated a wealth of ideas about how to join forces for the documentation and restoration of the collection of traditional wood boats salvaged by Arzanà, a Venetian association which has sponsored a number of Venice Project Center projects on the topic in recent years.

The general idea is to document the lines of the boats in the Arzanà collection using time-tested manual methods and then compare the measurements with the results obtained using more modern techniques such as laser scanner (which we hope to borrow from our LTS friends at Ideagroup) as well as the structured light techniques being developed by my friend Steve Guerin in Santa Fe, at the Redfish Group. Once we have obtained the lines, we would turn them into CAD drawings and save them for posterity, which would open up the possibility of reproducing the boats in the future.

We promptly discussed all of these possibilities with the editor of Wooden Boat Magazine, Tom Jackson, over dinner with his wife Corinne, before we sailed together up the Eggemoggin Reach on our first day on the water. Later we also talked to wood boat legend Willits Ansel, who suggested to involve another expert, Greg Rössel. Meanwhile, Jonathan has signed up for a one-day workshop on Boat Documentation at the Calvert Marine Museum connected with the Museum Small Craft Association annual conference on October 7. This group is appropriately responsible for the publication of the classic book on Boat Documentation...

Given the strong ties that these experts have with the Wooden Boat School in Maine, we are exploring the possibility of getting a replica of one of the Arzanà boats re-built in time for the 35th anniversary of the Settemari Association in the summer of 2012, when we plan to take our rowing club to the US for a whole month, parading our diesona and a small flotilla of Venetian boats down the rivers Charles (Boston), Hudson (New York), Schuylkill (Philadelphia) and Potomac (Washington), thanks to the planning provided by teams of students from SUNY Cortland's program in Sports Management, under the guidance of another old friend, John Meehan, who is tenured at Hudson Valley Community College.

Just yesterday, President Obama gave a key speech on innovation at this very college. He would be proud of the innovative ideas we developed with our old friends as we floated around Maine.

We will make sure that we wave at him when we pass the White House as we parade down the Potomac on our brand, new Maine-built Venetian boat in 2012!

The WPI Santa Fe Project Center is born

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 03:42:00 +0000

Over the summer, WPI's Provost John Orr gave the green flag for the creation of the WPI Santa Fe Project Center (SFPC) so today all six of our pioneering students who blazed the trail this past spring were at the WPI Global Project Fair, manning the first official Santa Fe table, where dozens of sophomores stopped to ask them questions about the Center they helped create. In the upcoming weeks, I will be offering a number of Information Sessions where interested students will be able to hear more about the new center, so they can decide if Santa Fe is where they want to complete their Interactive Qualifying Project in term D (March-April) of 2011.

Meanwhile, I have also been actively recruiting an interim contingent of about 12 students to bring to Santa Fe this coming spring of 2010 for the second round of preliminary projects just ahead of the first official group of 24-28 the following year.
I will be interviewing for the 2011 season when I fly back from Venice during Thanksgiving week for my customary marathon interview sessions to recruit the new breed of Venice, Boston and now Santa Fe students for the next academic year. The connection between Santa Fe and Venice, which was further cemented by Steve Guerin' s recent visit to Venice for the delivery of the Boat Traffic Simtable to the City's Traffic department, will be strengthened by the upcoming collaborations on several of the new Venice projects which we are developing this term. Simon Mehalek, chief technical officer of the Santa Fe Complex will travel to Venice this fall to be "scientist in residence" at the Venice Project Center, supporting all of the projects that will conclude the protracted 20th anniversary year for the VPC.

Finally, I am also recruiting WPI seniors to work on technical Major Qualifying Projects that will help us break new grounds in our quest to create an Ambient Platform for urban maintenance, management and planning based on the principles of City Knowledge. These joint research efforts will be conducted both in Venice and in Santa Fe, offering projects and internships in the summer and in the terms when the two centers operate (B in Venice and D in Santa Fe).

In true City Knowledge spirit, we should issue a birth certificate for the newly born Santa Fe Project Center!

Cheers!!

Venice 4.0 (B09)

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:55:00 +0000

This project will distill the most salient results from 20 years of VPC data, and will also harvest additional available Venice data, to create exciting, interactive online infographics that will encapsulate the main trends in the city. The data will support decision-making and policy proposals by the 40xVenezia.

One of the goals of this project is to "beef up" the accomplishments section of our Venice 2.0 website (under "Best of..."), but an equally important goal will be to create graphics that are easy to update sustainably in the years to come, once more up-to-date or more accurate data becomes available.

We expect the team to really learn from the most advanced graphical tools out there, by emulating the best examples of information design that are available on line and in press.

The team will coordinate with the "Venice 4.0" team of the 40xVenezia to set priorities that are aligned with the most urgent issues on the table.

Public Earth (B09)

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 05:53:00 +0000

This project will continue what the PreserVenice team accomplished last year for public art and will expand the work to the rest of our heritage catalogs which also include palaces, c on vents, churches, bells, belltowers and church floors.

The main goal of this project is to release all of our public art data to the web (following the model of Public Earth), after having organized, integrated and validated every VPC dataset, starting with the main Erratic Sculpture information, but making sure to include the long-neglected Belltowers, Bells and Church Floors.

The team will work with Public Earth to upload as much information as suitable for that site, but will primarily expand the current PreserVenice site with the intention of moving the maintenance of the information to crowdsourcing and with the goal of actually inaugurating the non-profit organization to begin collecting funds for the restoration and maintenance of the public collections of art in Venice and its lagoon. In this context, the team will interact with MIT Ph.D. candidate Laurie Zapalac who intends to study PreserVenice for her doctoral research at MIT.

The team will collaborate with the Regional Government of the Veneto to package the information for their archives as well.

The team will also experiment with the creation of an "ancient GIS" map based on the DeBarbari birdseye view of the city in the year 1500.

Mobility (B09)

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 05:51:00 +0000

Part of Venice's uniqueness derives from its being completely devoid of cars. Moving around in Venice means either walking or taking a boat. Every student going to Venice will get a boat pass (called imob) for the public transportation boats (ACTV), but once they get to Venice the will also discover that walking is often faster than taking a vaporetto or a motoscafo. Crossing the numerous bridges in Venice can be a problem for anyone with some kind of mobility impairment, which may include young mothers with a stroller, or tourists with large suitcases, as well as elderly people using a cane or a walker. WPI has developed the methodology still used today in Venice to collect boat traffic data, so this project team will summarize what we've done so far in the realm of boat traffic, with particular attention on its negative impacts, like moto ondoso and noise, water and air pollution, but will also explore pedestrian traffic as well, where we have not done much thus far.
This project will investigate pedestrian mobility as well as boat traffic and integrate them into a sustainable framework for the modeling of all mobility in Venice, using advanced autonomous agent models , with primary applications in the management of public space, event planning and emergency response. The team will incorporate its findings into the existing Venice Simtable system with assistance from Redfish, the Santa Fe Complex and VPC staff.
The team will touch upon all of these areas in terms of literature review, and will pursue as many of these lines as possible, upon consultation with the advisors. The team will plan the pursuit of the remaining research ideas for future student teams.

Veninomics (B09)

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:44:00 +0000

The team working on this project will study the various economies that interact in Venice, with a primary focus on the evolution of retail stores and on tourism and all related businesses, both formal and informal.

It is clear that the primary economic force in Venice is tourism, but questions remain as to how much of the wealth generated by visitors actually stays in Venice and percolates through to the citizens and to the local government that provides key services, such as public transportation, garbage removal, local policing, safety and security. This team will begin to answer this key question.

The team will revamp our ongoing series of projects on the Retail Sector and design a web application that will allow anyone to contribute information about what store was located where and when starting after World War II and until today. The online application will initially contain the data we have collected to date. Technical assistance will be provided by VPC staff as needed.

Keeping in mind that this is going to be the first of several projects in the years to come, the students will also explore the semi-formal (souvenir stalls and carts) and informal (illegal) economies such as the network of Rom beggars, the bag peddlers from West Africa, the flower sellers from Bagladesh, etc., in an attempt to quantify the various sub-sectors of the tourist industry, starting -- of course -- from any published literature on the subject.

Moreover, the team will leverage the information collected by Forma Urbis on the plateatici (e.g. restaurant tables in the squares) and include an economic assessment of the value of each square meter of tables and chairs that are placed on "leased" public space, possibly suggesting a new pricing scheme based on the paper published by Prof. Carrera et al. a few years back.

Based on existing data, as well as newly collected information, the team will also investigate the actual costs of Acqua Alta (high tides), both in terms of damage and loss of property/merchandise, as well as in terms of lost productivity and sales due to flooded streets and compare these costs (over a decade, say) to the loss of revenue experienced after 9/11 or during the ongoing global financial crisis.

The team will touch upon all of these areas in terms of literature review, and will pursue as many of these lines as possible, upon consultation with the advisors. The team will plan the pursuit of the remaining research ideas for future student teams.

Ships (B09)

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:27:00 +0000

In the 20 years of research at the Venice Project Center, we have never explored the workings of the Venice Harbor, which has historically represented the maritime essence of Venice's commercial enterprises. This year, we will inaugurate a series of projects focused on this long-neglected topic.

The team will gather as much publicly available information about the schedules of cruises that make a call in Venice throughout the year and incorporate the ships' arrivals into the Venice Boat Traffic model developed by the VPC in conjunction with Redfish in Santa Fe.

The team will monitor how passengers disperse through the city once they disembark from the ships, either on foot, or with taxis (boats and cars?) or otherwise. The outflow and inflow of passengers from and to the ships will be quantified and an assessment of the planned "people mover" that will connect the harbor with Piazzale Roma will be conducted. The information about the movement of cruise ship tourists will be incorporated into the pedestrian model being developed by the Mobility team.

In addition to that, the team will explore the positive economic impacts of the cruise ships, in coordination with the Veninomics team, as well as potentially harmful consequences of moto ondoso (direct and indirect), noise, vibrations and water and air emissions from the engines. The team will analyze available data and coordinate with Simon Mehalek of the Santa Fe Complex to determine what monitoring devices could be used for additional measurements, while trying to identify sources of funding for the initial proof-of-concept and for a full implementation in future years.

Finally, the team will also explore the social implications of shipping, especially in relation to the disturbance it may cause to inhabitants of nearby areas, both in Santa Marta and along the Riva dei Sette Martiri.

Post Postmortem (B09)

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:48:00 +0000

We have been developing a "Postmodern Postmortem" initiative since 2007, and this project will make tangible strides into the implementation of the concepts developed thus far. In essence, the postmodern postmortems are intended to:

interact with all 5 senses (touch, hear, see, smell and taste), and exercise the 6th (intuition)
represent concrete issues impacting the quality of life of Venetians
enthrall and titillate the passers-by with whimsical and beautiful street installations
engage the viewers into discovering the underlying theme through a "secret" game that explains the whole project

Thus far, we have identified 12 installations that would fit the specifications, but we'd like to get up to 20 for our 20th anniversary. We would like to attract installation ideas from artists around the world and in particular we'd like to engage the talented folks at the Santa Fe Complex.

This project will not only develop a mechanism to advertise the project on the web, but also implement, test and install as many of the pre-existing concepts as possible, using appropriate hardware such as Arduino or Sunspots, connected to our Venice server.

With the help of the VPC staff, and technical assistance from Simon Mehalek of the Santa Fe Complex, the students will solve any logistical issue associated with each installation, and design a system that will achieve the desired effect deploying minimalist sustainable technology in the field.

The team will also fully script and develop an overarching Augmented Reality Game (ARG) -- or Urban Reality Game (URG) -- to tie the 20 installations together into a "meaningful" experience for the viewers.

It is expected that the team will explore how to attract funding for the projects, while investigating the details of how to deploy the full complement of 20 installations in connection with the upcoming Venice Biennali (Architecture-2010 or Contemporary Arts-2011)

Unearthing Venice's Genealogy (B09)

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:23:00 +0000

This is the first posting for the new WPI undergraduate projects (IQPs) that will take place at the Venice Project Center in term B09 (October 25-December 19, 2009). Six more postings will follow to explain the remaining research projects that will take place in Venice this fall.

This first project will follow up on last year's "Origins of Venice" IQP, which was tasked to explore the origins of the city and its inhabitants, using archeology, genetics and ancient manuscripts.

This year's project will take the matter a bit further, by:

Designing an "archaeological web-app" that will allow the gradual accumulation of reusable Archaeological Data, which could be "modeled" and visualized by exploiting the potential of the Santa Fe sandtable for the interactive exploration of "archaeological" risk.
Continuing the collection of DNA samples in the context of the Genographic Project and developing a grant proposal for the full-fledged examination of the "origins of Venetians".
Promoting the development of uScript and continuing to detail its scope, functionalities and diffusion mechanisms.

As expected, this line of research will continue over multiple years and will yield important information in due time. It is part of the Venice 3.0 project...

Venice B09

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:55:00 +0000

It's an exciting year for the Venice Project Center. We are completing the 20th anniversary (Venice 2.0) and moving towards the next one (Venice 3.0). Thus, the projects we are tackling are to be viewed as trailblazers for longitudinal series of projects stretching into the future.

Here are the Venice B09 projects in a nutshell:

Origins -- to find out how the city of Venice evolved and where its inhabitants came from;
Postmortems -- to highlight the main challenges confronting Venice with a web of embedded art installations that obliquely reference each issue in a "game" of interactive innuendos scattered throughout the city;
Ships -- to investigate the cruise-ship industry in Venice and its consequences -- on moto ondoso, on related tourist business as well as on the quality of life of the citizens;
Veninomics -- to study the retail evolution and to assess the local import of the various economies at play in Venice: hotels, restaurants, bars, souvenirs, and other retail as well as informal economies like the "bag sellers", "flower sellers" and similar phenomena.
Mobility -- to sustainably model Venetian mobility, both pedestrian and waterborne.
Publicearth -- to organize and release the public art datasets collected by the VPC.
Venice 4.0 -- to encapsulate existing data into fungible and actionable infographics to support the cause of the 40xVenezia.

National Geographic (again)

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:04:00 +0000

In the current (August) issue of National Geographic Magazine, both Forma Urbis and the WPI Venice Project Center are credited for two maps that accompany an article about Venice, entitled "Vanishing Venice". The two maps show the proliferation of hotels in Venice in the past decade and the effects of flooding in Venice. The credits are in the lower right corner of each map. The Italian version of the magazine, also out in August, has Venice's story on the cover (whereas the English version highlights a Yellowstone story).

Curiously, the Italian cover story is entitled "Venezia Sotto Assedio" which is the exact same title ("Venice under siege") as the National Geographic Video that featured me as the host, and is apparently still airing around the world after eight years (last reported on Tasmanian TV).

A very interesting addition to the print versions is an online interactive map that allows the user to use a slider to see how much of Venice gets flooded with different tide levels. The VPC and Forma Urbis are credited in the online version as well.

Counting both the Italian and English versions of the magazine, this is the fifth time that our work has been featured on National Geographic, starting with a photo of a youthful Fabio surveying the canal walls with a boatful of students in 1999.

And, hopefully, it won't be the last...

Meno 1: epigraphs, epitaphs and chronograms

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:26:00 +0000

Well, another year has passed and today I turned 48. It was a good day overall, though the past year was tough for me. My dad got me a very tasty birthday cake, which said "Meno 1" (minus one) on it. Despite the flawed arithmetic (vis a vis my 50th birthday), I found the sign appropriate. There is one person missing from my life this year and I felt it. I also took it as a "memento mori", reminding me of how at any moment I could be one breath away from the aldilà. I also will use this as a mantra to catch myself thinking too much about the next thing to do, and to consciously take one step back from the future and return to the now.

Living in the now, as I am fond of doing, makes both past and future less significant and possibly less real. Nevertheless, it is hard to ignore the passing of time when the day of your birth cycles around the sun one more time. It's an infinitesimal tick in the humongous clock of the universe, but somehow it feels important in my world... That's how self-referential and special we make ourselves out to be, knowing full well that we are but brief manifestations of some underlying vital energy that makes us all really quite identical in the face of our epheMeral existenCe, which in the end will be aptly suMmarized by a smalL dash (an "em-dash" perhaps) separating the years or birth and death on our epitaph.

Thankfully, I have two more years available to make a legitimate contribution to the 40Xvenezia, before I mIgrate to the yet-to-be-created spinoff, the "Cinquanta per"... but I also have many decades ahead to contribute to Venice and the world before I catch up with my friend Bruno Nogara, who was born on the 28th of July, just one day before me, in 1920. I take solace in seeing him walking and talking and working still at the age of 89, after having been a scuba-diving paratrooper in WWII and a rugby champion, occupations that are almost as physically punishing as being a tour guide in Venice, as he still is to this day... It was good to have a celebratory spritz with him to remind myself of the possibilities ahead.

Later in the evening, after Kseniya Hewitt gave my mom (Wilma) a present to thank her for giving birth to me (a really touching Russian custom), I ran into an old friend of mine from my Sant'Elena youth, Geto (Giorgio) Rampazzo. Having experienced one of the greatest upheavals in my life this year, I could really empathize with my old buddy when he told me the heart-wrenching story of how his mate died in her sleep right next to him... The unimaginable pain he must have felt, made me realize how fortunate Nick and I are to be able to still talk and joke with Jackie, even though we do not live together any more. It's hard to fathom a harder blow, yet Geto lives on, in sadness, visiting her grave every week. As ephemeral and un-special as we are, it's impossible for us to be detached when momentous events affect us or those we love. It's inevitable (and necessary) to be human some time, and accept all our vulnerabilities and fears.

And so, Bruno, Geto, Cino, Wilma, Jackie, Nick and I continue to live on, moment by moment, in the now, which is still where it has always been, just minus one steps before the future that we are always so hopeful and fearful about...

Redemption in Venice

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:26:00 +0000

Nicolò and I will be spending the rest of July in Venice, enjoying some time with my parents (Nick's nonni: Wilma and Cino) and relatives, until August 3rd. Kyle has been here since June 11, producing excellent work and enjoying himself tremendously, as one can read in his Navigamus blog. We've also had a Tuscan intern from Florence, Andrea Tassinari, who has helped reorganize our office and helped clean up the Forma Urbis's web site.

Over the next few weeks, we have an ambitious set of goals:

Complete and submit grants to the National Science Foundation (ISE, ULTRA-Ex, INTEROP, STCI, IIS, SoCS), NASA (GCCE), the National Endowment for the Humanities (HCRR), the Mellon Foundation and the City of Santa Fe. In total, we're planning to submit for over 5 million dollars in grants, for projects ranging from uScript, the the Ambient Interactive Platform, to the SimTable for the management of water resources in Santa Fe, to CitizenPipe... This is our primary goal for the summer.
Plan the WPI projects for term B09, when the 20th Anniversary will officially end. We are exploring the following topics: (1) Informal Economies; (2) Retail Stores; (3) Shipping and Cruising; (4) Tourism economics; (5) Cost of floods; (6) DNA - origins of Venetians; (7) Postmodern Postmortems. We're pretty much all set with the apartments too.
Arrange for a variety of initiatives connected with the final celebrations of the anniversary, including: an alumni event, Venice 2.0 merchandise (t-shirts, bags, mugs, clocks, etc.), reconnecting with our sponsors, reaching out to more of our Venice alumni, exploring the Venice Trust to make the VPC free to future students, and more...
Promote our new collaborations with Ideagroup and others to make more of our projects operational in the management of the City of Venice, including the plateatici project, UNESCO, etc.
Have fun and relax!

Gotta go row my caorlina for the Redentore festival right now... Major fireworks!

It's the celebration of the end of the plague of 1576… Obviously people remember BAD things much longer than the good stuff… but look at how much fun people have had in the 400+ years since that plague, celebrating its end year after year! Good and bad intertwined.

One redeeming the other.

The Ying and Yang of life.

UCGIS Summer Assembly

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:52:00 +0000

On June 23, Steve and I were keynote speakers at the Summer Assembly of the University Consortium of Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), which was quite an honor. I quote UCGIS in my dissertation (page 13 of part I):

“As the variety of geospatial information and data resources
increases each year, the demand for understanding and building
sustainable information and knowledge structures remains a critical
research challenge for the geo-spatial information community.”

Given that the quote comes from the 2003 research priorities, it is interesting that the GIS community still has not converged on sustainable information infrastructures, despite lots of efforts in that direction, including a contribution that Joe Ferreira and I made a couple of years ago and an earlier one I published with Lorlene Hoyt in 2006.

Appropriately, the core of the presentation that Steve and I made revolved around Autonomous Urban Agents, a concept that I have bloogged about before and has been partially implemented in the Municipal Data Objects, which have also been discussed herein in recent months. I happen to think that attaching agents to municipal objects, combined with the issuance of an official birth certificate, as we have begun to do in the UK, promises to be a revolutionarily simple, yet powerful solution to the big spatial infrastructure debate.

I am sure that there will be some major developments on this front in the next 12 months. Most of them from Santa Fe...

Keep your eyes peeled!

Summer @ the Complex

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 03:55:00 +0000

Before Nick and I jump on the plane to the UK and Italy, here is a brief summary of the latest news from Santa Fe. I was there from June 18 to July 5. I got to stay at the casita again thanks to the buon cuore of Dede and Owen... And I got to use a deskspace provided by Steve in the Santa Fe Complex, thanks to his good heart.

Here is a quick list of things that happend while I was there:

I just missed Frankencircuit but got to see the show in a private viewing before it got dismantled. It looked great!
Steve and I gave a keynote lecture at the UCGIS Summer Assembly, which will be the topic of a separate blog entry. Had a chance to reconnect to Carl Steinitz on the occasion. Long story, but he did change my life, unwittingly...
Ilan and Ben worked together symbiotically to produce major progress on the Venice table interactivity. Pair programming is the way to go!
Fred Bianchi came to visit from WPI and stirred up our Postmortem projects once again
I made major progress on a proposal to the City of Santa Fe to create and Ambient Platform for Urban Planning, Water Conservation and Energy Management
I drafted a proposal to WPI's provost for the official establishment of te Santa Fe Project Center, to be phased in over the next two years.
I purchased a G1 phone and tasked Simon with the skunking of the Android potential for PixelPost applications, related to our NASA grant. I also got an iPhone for similar reasons (and because there was a deal if I renewed my AT&T subscription).
Kyle and I submitted two grants to NSF and one to NASA, all involving Santa Fe: Informal Science Education, Urban Long Term Research Areas-Exploration and Global Climate Change Education, Total requested is 2 million so far. More to come.
Skyler and August made progress on the visualization side of the Venice Table and began to coordinate with Ben and Ilan on the communication between the SimTable Operating System and the Venice Traffic Application.
Meeting with Luciano (Intel) and Roger (John Deere) it became clear that the Complex could play a formal role as the actual vector for the application of SFI theories to real world problems in the SFI Biz-net community...
Got to tailgate in a suit and tie when I went to see the premiere of La Traviata at the opening night of the Santa Fe Opera...
Experienced the phenomenal visual experience of Projected Light at the Complex. Fantastic!
Overlapped with Andrea Vaccari (recently with MIT Senseable Lab) with whom we are exploring Reality Mining with Nathan Eagle through a massive Rwanda dataset of 1.5 million subscribers' cell calls for the past five years... Something good will come of this, I am sure.

Overall, it was a good Summer @ the Complex!

I will be in close touch with the Santa Fe colleagues as we complete the Venice Table in time for delivery when Steve joins Nick and me in Venice on the 25th of July... More to come.

CitizenPipe

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 04:41:00 +0000

The reason for the recent blogging blackout has been that Kyle and I have gotten busy writing grants, as we had planned when he flew to Venice ahead of me. Now that I am back from Santa Fe and in MA for one more day before taking off across the Atlantic, I figured I would make a quick entry to begin to update everyone as to our progress on our many fronts.

The first grant we applied for is called CitizenPipe and so far we have only submitted a preliminary proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the Informal Science Education program. When we get the thumbs up, we will have until November 19 to complete the full proposal. We have been using Google Docs so extensively that I have almost forgotten how to use Word...

The aim of this project is to produce a coordinated suite of second-generation web-based and mobile tools that will personalize the on-line and in-the-field experiences of citizen scientists, with the ultimate goal of making their contributions simple, fun, rewarding, educational, meaningful and long-lasting. The primary intellectual merit of this proposal lies in reorienting the informal collection of scientific data away from the traditional primacy of the formal citizen science programs (as witnessed by Cornell's Citizen Science Central) and toward a "prosumer" (producer/consumer) focus on the volunteers who are the engines that make the whole world of citizen science possible and constitute the real resource that needs to be fostered, cultivated and rewarded.
The data gathered for free by volunteer citizen scientists constitutes a scarce resource. This project aims at emphasizing the "RE" in "REsource," by ensuring that the data crowdsourced by volunteers is REdistrubuted and REused in a multiplicity of contexts by a variety of organizations, creating a multiplier effect that maximizes the impact of the citizen scientists.

Look for one new grant every week from now on... we're on a roll!

Father of one

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 04:44:00 +0000

Yesterday was not only the solstice, but also Father's Day, and the midsummer night's ruminations I posted are connected in my mind to yet another article on the current Wired, which was extracted from Chris Anderson's newest book and was previously previewed in another issue of my favorite magazine.

Anderson writes about the "new hybrid world we're entering where scarcity and abundance exist side by side". He makes his case by pointing to how the massive availability of near-free storage has made many online activities proliferate abnormously (i.e. abnormally enormously). It is becoming clear to all of us that the Google mentality is the way of the future. Massive data flows are replacing grand theories and models. The truth is in the facts... Let's gather them and then figure out what they mean.

Species have been comparatively wasteful for eons, so this profligate approach has not been invented by Google. They have perfected it, but so have bluefin tuna.

I have no doubt that our future will be more about "thinning out" massive information overloads and relinquishing the ballast that we accumulate through unconscious consumerism. As we enter the era of simplexity, it is (abundantly) clear that we need to master abundance thinking.

When it comes to the perpetuation of our selfish genes, we mammals have a built-in bias toward the specialness of our offsprings. The absolute preciousness of my own progeny cannot be compared to the wasteful way in which other species reproduce by statistical chance. I am proud to be Nick's father and I am really glad that we made our cross-country trek this past spring. He's one of a kind and I love him dearly. I hope he feels the same about me...

A heartfelt Solstice

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:12:00 +0000

This morning (at 5:45am UTC), which roughly means yesterday at 10:45pm MST here in Santa Fe) was the 2009 Summer Solstice, vernacularly known as the longest day of the year (in our northern-hemispheric-centered way of thinking)...

To celebrate this midsummer day (I know it's weird to think of this as mid-summer, but in the old days they only had 2 seasons: summer and winter), Simon Mehalek, Shawn Barr and I planned to hike up from the Santa Fe ski basin (10,350 ft = 3,155 m) to the top of Tesuque Peak, which stands at 12,047 feet or 3,672 meters above sea level. Sunrise here was at 5:48am, so we got on our way at 2:30am and began walking up around 3:15am so we could get to the top in time to see the sun rise over the horizon.

Simon led the ascent at a clip that quickly became clearly unsustainable for my unacclimated body. Just as soon as I got him to slow down, Simon had an episode of AVNRT, which is a non-life-threatening, congenital form of Supraventricular Tachycardia from which he (and his siblings) suffer. The stress from the highly successful Frankencircuit show at the Santa Fe Complex had caused another episode earlier in the week, therefore we took this as another sign from Simon's body to "take it eezy" and relax. So, as all good mountaineers are apt to do, we decided to abort our solstice mission and return to base camp. Just as we were doing that, Ben Lichtner, his girlfriend Marie and two friends were coming up the slope. My idea about the solstice sunrise hike had inspired them to join us, so it was good to think that at least one of our SFx teams would make it to the summit (though in the end they didn't either)...

As we came down the mountain and back to civilization I found myself pondering about a recent Wired magazine article entitled "Know thyself", about the personal metrics movement and the "quantified self" or more generally about the "macroscope", whereby we'll be able "to link myriad bits of natural data into a larger, readable pattern". If Simon had been monitoring himself, and sharing his health symptoms on curetogether, while tracking his food intake with tweetwhatyoueat, and recording vital statistics automatically using Nike+ or Fitbit, or manually logging his heart rates and blood pressure on a mobile app, perhaps he could have prevented the (re-)occurrence of his palpitations? I wonder...

Earlier in the evening, we had received an invitation to go to a stargazing party, which we decided to bow out of because of our hike. Once we were on the mountain, we got to see the firmament in its full glory even without the aid of a telescope. It was an awesome reminder of just how small a place we humans occupy in the spatio-temporal vastness of the universe.

At the same time, though, the microscopically aberrant cycles of Simon's heart reminded us of the irreplaceable value of each human being here and now. His continuing life on this mostly harmless and utterly insignificant little blue-green-planet was of paramount importance to Shawn and me and getting him to a place of safety was much more urgent than anything else at that moment. We got back safely, saw the sunrise from town and were no worse off for it.

And yes. Simon is fine, in case you wonder.

Happy solstice to all!

Nubisphere

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:27:00 +0000

Check out the new rotating cloud sphere of tags on the right sidebar of my blog. It's a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of labels (note to self: be selective in your tagging!). But it sure is interesting none the less. Below is a "thinned out" version of the cloud, showing the most frequent tags for your clicking enjoyment!

Blogumus is derived from Roy Tanck by way of Amanda Fazani...

bIGNITE @ the Complex

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 04:06:00 +0000

We are making plans for a bIG NITE at the Santa Fe Complex where we can all share where we're at and what we are thinking about in 5 minutes and then have a party to celebrate each other!

It will be fun and useful.

My presentation is evolving and viewable in google docs.

It will change until the last minute, with an exponential rate of change the closer we get to the time of the presentation.

It's the procrastination derivative... Very steep slope.

July 5th? Potluck food. BYOG.

I'll Bring My Own Grappa...

Party will follow.

Citizen Science 2.0

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 04:35:00 +0000

Citizen Science is the ante litteram crowdsourcing activity. Individuals have collected scientific data for a bigger cause way before crowdsourcing became a widespread buzzword and a long time prior to the existence of Wikipedia and the World Wide Web. The Audubon's Christmas Bird count has been going on since 1900...

In the context of the NASA-funded Digital Earth Watch (DEW) project, we have an opportunity to explore the citizen science universe through the lenses of front line practitioners such as Kitty from the Cornell Ornithology Lab and Kirsten and Sandra from Budburst at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Our "models" and inspirations are evoked in the presentation I gave at the DEW workshop in April.

View more OpenOffice presentations from Fabio Carrera.

Our specific contributions to the project are:

To investigate a “crowdsourcing” application to collect, organize, analyze and share PicturePost submissions.
To explore ways in which users could “design” their own window into the DEW project, by composing their own web pages.
To visualize PicturePost data in intriguing and sophisticated ways.
To experiment with a set of social networking services that will foster interaction with the global data repository and with other users across the globe.
To prototype a series of electronic alert and reminder systems to invite users to collect data at crucial times of the year.
To experiment with alternative observation methods that do not require a physical picturepost (the “virtual” picturepost).
To allow others to contribute new online analytical or visualization functions and share them with the community.

After the workshop, Steve and I had a chance to brainstorm all the way back to Santa Fe and we came up with a whole new approach to citizen science, centered on the "prosumer", i.e. the volunteer researcher who is willing to collect and submit scientific observations. We are framing our new approach around the 3 tenets I stumbled upon in my early synchronized crowdsourcing experience (make it simple, fun, and rewarding). During the current DEW project, we will experiment with the latest interactive online technologies, such as: tweets, sms, blogs, social networks, location-aware mobile applications and augmented 3D digital photography. It is clear that a full-fledged, self-organizing, emergent Citizen Science 2.0 framework would require a separate research effort with appropriate funding. Preparing an NSF grant proposal for this line of research is going to be the primary task Kyle Miller will tackle when he arrives in Venice later this week for his summer internship...

Look for a "CitizenPipe" entry later.

The best is yet to come...

The shroud of Turing

carrera@wpi.edu (Fabio Carrera) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:28:00 +0000

During dr. Woohoo's visit, we had a chance to visit MIT's CSAIL (Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab) with Dan Paluska. After getting lost in the labyrinthine halls of the Stata Center, the iconic Frank Gehry masterpiece of seemingly crumbling and collapsing metal and brick, we were treated to a live demonstration of the creation of a Jesus toaster insert with a somewhat dated, but still fascinating waterjet cutter.

The whimsical creation that results from the metal cutter produces a realistic replica of the shroud of Turin very similar to the one that has been inexplicably emerging since 2005 from the holy toaster now worshipped by millions.

As boranj as this is, I think it would still make Alan proud to discover the miraculous ramifications of his theories. Father Guido would see this as yet another example of how easy it is to be sanctified in this country.

Speaking of Saints, wait till you see our Venice 2.0 response to this holy effigy... so fine! Just wait!