FBK retreat - The future of scientific and technological research

On Thursday 29 and Friday 30, January 2009 here in FBK there will be the Retreat event “New Directions for Scientific and Technological Research”. Here you can find the programme. You can also connect to the online streaming, starting from the 29th of January. The retreat is organized by the Centers “Materials and Microsystems” and “Information Technology”, and aims to share insights on the future of the Internet and on Nano & Micro Technologies. There will be great invited speakers, such as Peter Seitz (Vice-President Nano-medicine, CSEM SA) - Switzerland, Mark Maybury (Executive Director – MITRE) – USA, Hendrik Berndt (VP & CTO of DoCoMo Eurolabs) – Germany/Japan, Roger Kilian-Kehr (Research Architekt, SAP Research Center CEC Karlsruhe), João da Silva (Director of the Network & Communication DG-INFSO), Malik Ghallab (CEO for Science and Technology – INRIA) - France, Yuichi Matsushima (Vice President of NICT) – Japan, Prabhakar Raghavan (Head of Yahoo! Research) – USA, Wolfgang Wahlster (CEO and Scientific Director of DFKI) - Germany, ...and many others!

Michela in SoNet!

That's it!
Since the 15th of October I've been in the SoNet (Social Networking) exploratory project, aimed at exploring the Web2.0 through both theoretical and applied research. The project is carried out within FBK (Fondazione Bruno Kessler), a research organization of the Autonomous Province of Trento that promotes research in the areas of science, technology, and humanities.
So, the SoNet projects is aimed at studying characteristics of the networks (both online and offline), taking advantage of an interdisciplinary approach through the collaboration of psychologists, sociologists and computer scientists. Among the purposes of SoNet, bringing groundbreaking contributes to the characterization of social networks and their evolution in time, and provinding new advanced services to the users, are of a key relevance.
One of the first objective will be the development of a real social networking system involving FBK researchers, to improve new way of researching and knowledge sharing. The keywords within this framework are therefore "aggregation", "sharing", "collaboration", "dissemination". The strategies to achieve this are that of "eat your own dog food", "controlled viral spreading", and "always in beta". This approach will be employed to develop a social networking platform (a web based internal portal), and, in the meantime, to collect data for theoretical research.

Let's go!