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Tommaso Bolognesi ISTI Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie
dell'Informazione |
Profile
After
completing my thesis at the University of Pavia and Collegio Ghislieri (Laurea in
Physics ‘cum laude’ – C. Jacoboni, E. Gagliardo, 1976), on measures of
entropy in natural languages and gregorian chant, I developed an
interest for the application of stochastic processes, 1/f noise and
fractals to computer-supported
music composition. This interest led me to join the Computer
Music Group at CNUCE, coordinated by maestro Pietro Grossi,
and to spend two years at Urbana-Champaign, one of the places where
Computer Music moved its first steps in the late 1950’s. Subsequently
I have developed an interest in formal (and non-musical) specification
languages and models, joining the group on Distributed Systems and
Communication Protocols led by L. Lenzini at
CNR/CNUCE, Pisa. The activity on “Formal Methods and Tools” (this
is the name of the group at CNR/ISTI
where I currently work), has kept me busy for a relatively long period,
during which I have been visiting scientist at IBM Zurich Research (work with
H. Rudin on specification and verification of time-dependent
communication protocols), I have contributed to the definition of the LOTOS standard formal
specification language, as a member of the ISO group led by Ed Brinksma
(1984-1989), I have participated into several national and European
projects, with various roles, including coordination (LotoSphere
and DimmiBene), I have been member of the Technical Programme Commitee
of most editions of the IFIP WG6.1
Conferences FORTE (Formal
Techniques for Distributed Systems and Communication Protocols) and PSTV
(Protocol Specification, Testing, and Verification), and of other
conferences (AQuIS, SEFM, ATVA, ICFEM). I have been General chair
and Programme Committee co-chair of the Joint International Conference FORTE/PSTV
2000, and
in February 2004 I have been elected member of the Steering Committee
of FORTE. My
favourite research topics in this period have been: correctness
preserving transformations, graph-based representation and
transformation of process networks, timed extensions of process
algebra, formal specification styles (e.g. constraint-oriented
specification) and paradigms (event-oriented vs. state-oriented),
Abstract State Machines (ASM), Temporal Logic of Actions. Most
recently I have joined the Sensoria IP European project, coordinated by
M. Wirsing, which focuses on Service Oriented Computing. Although
for many years I have been a strong supporter of the event-oriented
formal specification paradigm, as embodied by process algebraic
languages, in more recent years I have devoted some attention to the
state-oriented paradigm as well, having had the opportunity to interact
with the ASM community (Y.
Gurevich, E. Boerger) and with L. Lamport, whose TLA+ I currently teach
in my Software
Engineering Course at the Univ. of Siena. In
december 2004 I bumped into Wolfram’s NKS (New
Kind of Science). According to the ultimate NKS conjecture, the
complexity we observe in the physical Universe is of computational
nature, and might correspond to the emergent features of computations
that, similar to those of cellular automata, are based on the iterated
application, at ultra-low physical scales, of elementary transformation
rules. NKS
creates a fashinating
bridge between some of the most genuinely ‘scientific’ (as opposed to
tehnological) areas of Computer Science (such as logics, formal models
of computation, complexity theory) and fundamental physics, not to
mention biology and bio-computing. Chaos theory did offer a
similar opportunity, but, I believe, on a much smaller and
less ambitious scale. Wolfram’s book explores a
large part of the computational universe – but not Petri nets, nor
process algebra! This explains why I am back to nested structures,
stochastic processes, randomness and fractals (see picture
aside). My first concrete step in this direction has been to
attend the 2005
NKS Summer School with Wolfram and his staff, where I have started
exploring 2D visual indicators for Petri net and process algebraic
computations. In the meantime I have started giving introductory
talks on NKS, and I am actively looking for multidisciplinary
collaborations on these
topics. I present some results on my recent investigations at the NKS’06
Conference. |
 Process
algebraic computation simulating Hilbert-Wolfram pseudorandom numeric
sequence: a[0] = 1 a[n+1]
= 3/2 * a[n] if a[n] is even 3/2 * (a[n]+1)
if a[n] is odd. |
Curriculum and selected
publications (2005) Recent
conferences: St.Eve/FM’03, Forte’05, Sefm’05, ICFEM’05, Forte’06, ICFEM’06, NKS’06 Books: TLA+
(L. Lamport), NKS (S.
Wolfram), The
Unknowable (G. Chaitin) Elementary
cellular automata applet (Israeli-Goldenfeld) Topics
for further research and collaboration |
