Wind (Storm?) of change

December 12th, 2007

On Friday, a couple of my students are going to defend their Master Thesis. I’ll be present and I have to say that this is a special event for me. I have been mentoring other students before… but the idea that this project became true and available open source is somehow awesome (JDPF project). Moreover, they are probably going to be my last students in Pavia (Italy). In fact, I am moving elsewhere after something like 15 years. Packing time is almost over… let’s see if snow storms are going to be over when I am supposed to land.

Dream (from Wikipedia)

December 9th, 2007

A dream is an experience of a sequence of images, sounds, ideas, emotions, or other sensations usually during sleep, especially REM sleep.

The events of dreams are often impossible, or unlikely to occur, in physical reality: they are also outside the control of the dreamer. The exception to this is known as lucid dreaming, in which dreamers realize that they are dreaming, and are sometimes capable of changing their dream environment and controlling various aspects of the dream. The dream environment is often much more realistic in a lucid dream, and the senses heightened.

How many dreams can you remember in the morning? How many lucid dreams? Are you a dreamer?

JDPF (Java Data Processing Framework)

December 5th, 2007

This is the first time I am posting something regarding my projects. JDPF (www.jdpf.org) is a framework for the definition of pipelines/nets for performing data analysis. I’ve been personally involved many times in the definition of algorithms for doing every sort of data processing (mainly in medical informatics). For this reasons, some time ago I thought to create something that was able to foster re-usability of data analysis components. And I thought it should have been free, hopefully community driven.

The first implementation, two years ago, has been done from scratch and it was already giving an idea of the power of such an architecture (pipelines are not a news). Recently with the outstanding work of a couple of students (Bruno Farina and Paolo Mauri) and with the valuable help of Ezio Caffi we decided to move to OSGI technology… (it continues here).