I have been a PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit for already seven months and I think it is time to draw the first conclusions.

As I probably already said a while ago, I am currently doing a PhD in high performance distributed systems at the Computer science department at the VU, in Amsterdam. I have started seven months ago, and I do enjoy my work very much. Last October I went to Washington DC to present a paper that I have submitted to the ISWC conference. It was my first experience in an international conference, and I found it very interesting. My paper got good feedbacks, met many people, so it couldn't be better!

After, many other things happened. I flew to many places (Germany, Australia, Greece, etc.) for conferences and projects meetings, and in the meantime I also spent some holidays with my girlfriend (Greece and USA). One of the things I enjoy the most in traveling are the airports: what I like very much is to watch people leaving or arriving, in business or on holidays, sleeping on a bench or running through the security gates. One thing that I don't like of traveling are big hotels, because they are so impersonal with their sterilized giant rooms. It gets even worse when they try to make you feel special with their cheap tricks. A little chocolate on the pillow or a nice origami with the towel. Once I got delivered in my room a birthday cake. How sweet...

Anyway, I often ask myself whether doing a PhD should be considered as a job or not. In Netherlands PhD students receive a salary as normal employees but this doesn't mean much to me. My main objection against seeing the PhD as a job is that you don't stop your PhD when you go home, or during your weekend. Also, working is a sort of activity where you give something to somebody (work) in exchange of money. In a PhD you don't work for your university but for yourself. Doing a nice PhD is something that depends completely on yourself.

I also don't like to define the PhD as a kind of school time. The fact that you learn to do research is not enough to qualify it as school. Almost all jobs teach you some skills. Also, during a PhD you don't get grades, or punishments. You cannot fail a PhD (with some exceptions of course).

It's something in the middle and I like it. In the next months I will try to write more regularly (and not once every six months) and talk about what keeps me busy at the moment. Considering that I lost count of all the times I said it, I wouldn't count on it if I were you... :)

Book of the month: Waste of Tristram Stuart
Music of the month: Calexico

tot ziens!

I thought for a while about how to start this blog post. Many things have happened since the last time and I didn't know where to start. Maybe from my school? Or from my work? Well, since the introduction got written by itself it's now time to report what's going on.

The past. In July I finally got graduated. I finished my master in AI at the Vrije Universiteit with a good baggage of gained experience and knowledge. I think it was worth doing it. I had the chance to study really cool stuffs and meet many interesting people. I have lived in a city (Amsterdam) that is quite different from my home town with all the pros and cons. I went on holidays with my girlfriend and we visited many places in Europe. Of course I also spent time with my family and I have enjoyed living in Chiampo, cycling on the Alps, playing tennis with old friends, etc. In this summer I also had a bit of time (3 months) to change some web pages and reorganize everything. I added two pages, one about my master thesis (here) and another about a project I worked on the last year (here). If you work on Semantic Web you will probably find them interesting.

The present. I will move back to the Netherlands very soon. I was accepted as PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit and I will work between the department of Parallel Programming and Distributed computing and Knowledge representation. The PhD starts at the beginning of October and I am very excited to start. The results of my thesis showed that the combination Semantic Web and Parallel programming can produce something good and I will spend the next four years researching on these fields. Why did I choose a PhD? If you follow my blog for a very long time you maybe remember what I find important in a job (here). Apart jokes, I chose the PhD simply because I like research. Science is a vibrant environment where many people continuously exchange ideas to solve some problems. It is an environment not bounded by strict rules (hierarchy, dressing code, etc.) but only by results. More in particular I like the idea of Semantic Web and I think it's worth to spend my energies on it.

The future. Well, I don't have so much to write about it. The only thing I can say is that the paper I wrote about my master thesis was accepted at the ISWC conference and at the end of October I will fly in Washington to attend it. It is my first time to the USA and I also want to do some sightseeing, just to see how our American friends like to live. Stay tuned for future updates.

Books of the month(s): Thus spoke Zarathustra of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Music of the month: Nightmare before Christmas soundtrack.

tot ziens

Today is a lovely day in the Netherlands and I was walking in Utrecht when I stumbled on this.



Ok, they say that Holland is the Venice of the north, but this is a bit too much. What is a Venetian gondola doing in here?!? And what are those people thinking? Here a brief list of what they could have been thinking during their lovely trip:

• ...look at that! I didn't know there were so many bikes in Venice...

• ...it's not that warm here... strange, even in June I need to wear a jacket sometimes...

• ...I read that in Italy the law it's very strict but here it's very easy to get some marijuana...

• ...the sailor said it was just 10 minutes but I think it's taking a bit too long to go to San Marco's square...

• ...wow, the Venetian dialect is very different than Italian... I speak Italian a bit but here I don't understand anything...

• ...I didn't like the typical dish "nieuwe haring" they serve here around. Strange, they told me the Italian kitchen was one of the best...

tot ziens,

It has been few months that I'm busy writing my master thesis. I chose the problem of reasoning in semantic web over a massive amount of data.

The choice mainly lies on the fact that very soon the amount of data will grow to the point it will be impossible to reason over it using a single machine. Semantic web is increasing its popularity and very soon it can reach a level that the computational and storage power of single machines are not enough. Think about the traditional web: storing and managing all the information present on the web is simply science fiction.

This problem can be solved trying to parallelize the computation and this is what I am investigating on for my master thesis. More in specific what I am doing is to use the Hadoop framework to implement a RDFS/OWL reasoning. The task is not trivial because distributed algorithms give their best when we can partition the data and unfortunately this is not the case of semantic web where the data is heavily connected to each other. After I finished it I want to publish the results in a dedicated page on this website hoping someone will find it interesting. Let's see how it goes.

All right. I've decided to move my former blog to this new place with my own domain. It was a long time that I wanted to do that, mainly for two reasons: first, I can add other pages and describe a bit better some projects/works I am involved in, and second because I have a bit more control on where and how my data is stored.

I won't delete my old blog, at least not in the short time. If you are interested in my old posts you can reach it clicking here.

Well, I hope you will enjoy this new layout and I hope I can fill this website with a lot of new stuffs.

a presto!