The Spanish connection

I find it amazing how fast (bad) news fly from Italy from Colombia (and, presumably, to the rest of Southamerica). We are of course talking about the kind of news related to Berlusconi, his scandals, ridiculous statements, and all the things in between. I am sure Italians will be surprised/ashamed to know that the average Colombian knows very well who SB is, is well-acquainted with his doings, and that media here is eager to inform about SB's absurd remarks and corruption scandals.

The obvious question is then: how come Berlusconi manages to receive so much press around here? The short answer is: Spain. For some reason I fail to understand, Spanish press has something against Berlusconi. Why is that? My conjecture is that SB's enemies are unable to attack him in Italy, given his strong influence on Italian media. So, anyone willing to attack SB should appeal to foreign newspapers such as El Pais to do the dirty work for them (i.e. to expose his scandals). El Pais is indeed a very good place to be updated about bad things in Italy. Whenever I don't follow some political event in Italy, I go there: they usually explain very well the historical background of each scandal and manage to put things in context. Hence, there is a strong link between Italy and Spain, in such a way that information about bad news in Italy flows easily to Spain.

The link between Spain and Southamerica is more explicit and easier to explain. In the last years we have witnessed an unfortunate invasion of Spanish media groups in Colombia. The two most important newspapers in Colombia (El Tiempo and El Espectador) either belong to Spanish media groups or have strong informative alliances with Spanish newspapers. As a consequence, in newspapers here it is very easy to find content targeted for Spanish audiences; such a content is reproduced here essentially because no translation is needed and copy-and-paste is cheap and quick. This way, if you read something in El Pais on a Sunday, it is very likely that it will appear in El Espectador (my favorite Colombian newspaper) the week after. Several times it has occurred that SB says something stupid/pseudofunny and that such declarations are not covered by, say, La Repubblica, but appear quickly in El Pais (and hence, in El Espectador).

Research, TV ads, and Unacknowledgements

On Commercials. These days there is some relative controversy among Italian researchers because of a TV commercial. You can watch the commercial here. As it is quite likely that the commercial will be erased in the next few days, here's a rough description.

The advertised product is a bank; the commercial shows Claudio, 33, an Italian researcher at a laboratory in the US. We are told that he has an Italian laurea and an american PhD, and that he decided to remain at Los Angeles after finishing his studies. The commercial suggests that Claudio is very successful at what he does. In fact, he appears doing fancy stuff in a very modern laboratory. It is not clear what exactly Claudio's research is, though. Unfortunately, Claudio is not entirely happy and so, one day at the beach, he decides to return to Italy. Claudio has a girlfriend/coworker called Kate; she doesn't like Claudio's decision.

The next thing we see is Claudio resigning to his position at the American laboratory. Right after that, we see Claudio at what appears to be a very modern laboratory, but in Italy. At the Italian lab ---which is very similar to the American lab we saw before--- a colleague says to Claudio: "it feels as if we were in the US". Claudio replies: "and even better". We are told that it is not known if Claudio will fulfill his dreams. Then we see Kate appearing out of nothing, speaking a crappy Italian. Claudio and Kate get on a motorcycle and take a ride. The commercial closes; it reads: "There is an Italy that fights for its own dreams. We stand next to that Italy."

The commercial is offensive in that it Claudio's history is extremely unrelated to reality. It's almost science fiction. There are many highly skilled Italians doing research abroad. This is a very notorious phenomena nowadays, which can be perceived at basically every area of science and arts. Given the way in which the Italian research system expels its most talented individuals, the story of Claudio ---who willingly returns to Italy, with the same research conditions he had in the US--- appears simply laughable. And then it is not clear to me why a bank would like to produce such a commercial. The Italian system is infamous for the ever decreasing funds assigned to education and research, not to mention the unclear, old-fashion procedures it uses to distribute such funds and hire new young researchers. Sadly, the mere fact that the bank dared to produce such a commercial reveals that the Italian society at large is not aware of the huge problem brain drain represents for the country.

On

Unacknowledgements. As you probably know, it is common to add an "acknowledgments" section at the end of a scientific paper. There you thank people who helped you or gave you ideas for developing it, and/or mention the projects/institutions that funded your research. It is not mandatory to write such a section, of course. Well, today I saw something interesting that might impose a trend. In a very recent paper, the authors ---three researchers from Sapienza University of Rome--- include something else. As usual they have an acknowledgments section:

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous referees for their useful suggestions.

The novelty is the mention they added right after that:

Unacknowledgements

This work is ostensibly supported by the the Italian

Ministry of University and Research under the FIRB

program, project RBIN047MH9-000.

The Ministry

however has not paid its dues and it is not known

whether it will ever do.

You can take a look to the paper here. (For those of you in the CS world: the paper was accepted at SODA 2010, the ACM-SIAM symposium on discrete algorithms, a top conference on algorithmics.)

I suspect this indeed will initiate a trend, as I am sure there are many researchers in Italy in the same situation. Whether this is an appropriate way of acting or not is a matter of discussion. I was surprised by the originality of the protest. It is worth observing that generally completing a (good) paper represents a great effort, and hence arriving to a point where you write an acknowledgments section for a work of yours is supposed to be satisfying. Therefore, it is very sad to see people who arrived there and recorded their frustration in such a way. It is a matter of desperation, I suppose.

Acknowledgments for a PhD thesis

The following is the acknowledgments section of my recently finished PhD thesis, entitled "Higher-Order Concurrency: Expressiveness and Decidability Results". For those interested in the actual thesis (and not in the thing below), it should be publicly available later this year, as a technical report of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bologna. If you cannot wait that long, drop me an email and I will send you the current draft.


My greatest debt is to Davide Sangiorgi. Having him as supervisor has been truly inspiring. His careful supervision has influenced enormously my way of doing (and approaching) research. His continuous support and patience during these three years were fundamental to me. I am still amazed by the fact that Davide had always time for me, not only for scientific discussions but also for sorting out everyday issues. I am most grateful to him for his honest and direct advice, and for the liberty that he gave me during my studies.

I also owe much to Camilo Rueda and Frank D. Valencia. I do not forget that it was Camilo who introduced me to research, thus giving me an opportunity that most people in his position would have refused. Even if my PhD studies were not directly related to his research interests, Camilo was always there, interested in my progresses, encouraging me with his support and friendship. Frank not only introduced me to the concurrency theory; he also gave me constant advise and support during my PhD studies and long before. Frank had a lot to do with me coming to Bologna, and that I will never forget.

There is no way in which I could have completed this dissertation by myself. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with extremely talented people, to whom I am deeply grateful: Cinzia Di Giusto, Ivan Lanese, Alan Schmitt, Gianluigi Zavattaro. Thank you for your kindness, generosity and, above all, for your patience.

Many thanks to Uwe Nestmann and Nobuko Yoshida for having accepted to review this dissertation. Thanks also to the members of my internal committee (commissione), Cosimo Laneve and Claudio Sacerdoti-Coen. I am indebted to Simone Martini, the coordinator of the PhD program, for his constant availability and kindness.

Many people proof-read parts of this dissertation, and provided me with constructive criticisms. I am grateful to all of them for their time and availability: Jesus Aranda, Alberto Delgado, Cinzia Di Giusto, Daniele Gorla, Julian Gutierrez, Hugo A. Lopez, Claudio Mezzina, Margarida Piriquito, Frank D. Valencia. A special thanks goes to Daniele Varacca, who suffered an early draft of the whole document and provided me with insightful remarks. Along these years I have benefited a lot from discussions with/comments from a lot of people. I am most grateful for their positive attitude towards my work: Jesus Aranda, Ahmed Bouajjani, Gerard Boudol, Santiago Cortes, Rocco De Nicola, Daniele Gorla, Matthew Hennessy, Thomas Hildebrandt, Kohei Honda, Roland Meyer, Fabrizio Montesi, Camilo Rueda, Jean-Bernard Stefani, Frank D. Valencia, Daniele Varacca, Nobuko Yoshida.

During 2009 I spent some months visiting Alan Schmitt in the SARDES team at INRIA Grenoble - Rhone-Alpes. The period in Grenoble was very enriching and productive; a substantial part of this dissertation was written there. I am grateful to Alan and to Jean-Bernard Stefani for the opportunity of working with them and for treating me as another member of the team. I would like to thank Diane Courtiol for her patient help with all the administrative issues during my stay, and to Claudio Mezzina (or the “tiny little Italian with a pony tail”, as he requested to be acknowledged) for being such a friendly office mate. I also thank the INRIA Equipe Associee BACON for partially supporting my visit.

I would like to express my appreciation to the University of Bologna - MIUR for supporting my studies through a full scholarship. Thanks also to the administrative staff in the Department of Computer Science, for their help and kindness in everyday issues.

I am most proud to be part of a small group of Colombians doing research abroad. We all share many things: we started in the same research group, have similar backgrounds, and came to Europe more or less at the same time. With most of them I even shared an office for a long time. Many thanks to: Jesus Aranda, for his inherent kindness; Alejandro Arbelaez, for the good times while working in Colombia and his hospitality during trips to Paris; Andres Aristizabal, for the constant support in spite of our favorite football teams; Alberto Delgado, with whom I started doing research back in 2002 and has always been there ever since; Gustavo Gutierrez, for the old, good times when he was my first boss, and for the sincere support during all these years; Julian Gutierrez, for all the discussions on life and research, during our PhDs and even way before; Hugo A. Lopez, for sharing with me the experience of living in Italy, several trips, and a plenty of discussions on concurrency theory and life at large; Carlos Olarte, for all the good times in Paris and hospitality in the great city of Bourg-la-Reine; Luis O. Quesada, for his exceptional kindness and hospitality during a visit to Ireland (despite of the fact that my visit brought historical floodings to the Cork region). Above all, I would like to thank all of them for being my friends.

Perhaps the most significant achievement of my PhD studies is all the people I have meet along the way. A special thanks goes to: Cinzia Di Giusto, for her constant support and friendship, and for being the most enthusiastic partner in research one could imagine; Antonio Vitale, for the several trips and for sharing with me bits of PhD frustration and pizzas of varying quality; Ivan Lanese, the loyal friend, the reasonable flat mate, and the talented co-author. Thanks also to: Stefano Arteconi, for insightful and enjoyable discussions on Italy, movies, and music; Ferdinanda Camporesi, for the many chats and the movies we watched together; Marco Di Felice, for being the most welcoming and friendly office mate in underground and being worse than me in calcetto; Ebbe Elsborg (and family) ---the most loyal reader of my blog--- for his kind hospitality during the most splendid vacation in Denmark I could have imagined, and for plenty of discussions on pretty much every aspect of life; Elena Giachino and Luis Perez, for all the fun we had together at summer schools, and for dinners and parties at Pisa; Zeynep Kiziltan, for the chats over lunch that didn’t deal about work; Flavio S. Mendes, for the many trips we did together around Italy, the constant support and friendship, and the many times I stayed at his place; Margarida Piriquito, for the most unexpected friendship I can remember; Sylvain Pradalier, or the coolest French guy I could have shared an office with; Alan Schmitt (and family), for the several great dinners at his place (in Grenoble, but also in Casalecchio) and the clever games in which I would always lose no matter how hard I would try.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my family for their unconditional, constant support. There are no words to thank my parents, my sisters, my brother, and my grandmother. Their love gave me strength to overcome the difficult times. I would also like to thank Andres Monsalve, who is more like a brother than a friend to me. Thanks also to the rest of my family, the many cousins, uncles, and aunts for their continued support towards me.

Mockus

Last Friday was a rather fortunate day for Colombian democracy. The constitutional court ruled against the referendum law that could have allowed president Alvaro Uribe to run for a third term in office. This way, Alvaro Uribe will have to leave office next August 7th. Yay. This outcome evidences that democracy and institutions in Colombia are far more solid than in other countries of the region (such as Venezuela and Bolivia) where very popular presidents have managed to get reelected over and over, thus enforcing real constitutional dictatorships.

So we will elect a new president next May. There are several competent candidates, which is something very positive. Oddly enough, the guy who is by far the most competent and prepared candidate for president does not stand any chance of winning. Not in this election, and most likely not in those to come. The name of this candidate is Antanas Mockus, and in this post I will tell you a bit about him.

Antanas Mockus, a son of Lithuanian immigrants, is a mathematician who had a rather successful academic career. In fact, in the early 90s he was a professor and president of the National University of Colombia. In 1993 he ran successfully for Mayor of Bogotá. From the very beginning he has been a very unorthodox politician. His style is unique in that he exploits symbolism, humor, and common sense in all of his initiatives. He is well-known for pedagogic campaigns against violence and in favor of education and urban culture.

Antanas is mostly remembered by the fact that he does weird things in order to make his point and/or attract people's attention. For instance, as President of the National University, he showed his white ass to all attendees of a public forum (I think he did so because the audience was disrespectful with him, but I am not sure). This reaction made him famous. Wearing strange custumes and hats is part of the symbolism he uses in his public appearances. This is Antanas, posing as a superhero in favor of culture:

The accompanying text reads: Mockus and his team developed policies to make the moral of people in Bogotá more congruent with respect to law and culture, and against violence.

Antanas was an outstanding mayor for the huge city of Bogotá. His management was brilliant, and his political style was admired all around the country for his originality and decency. Soon after his first term as mayor he has attempted unsuccessfully to run for president, at least twice. In 2006, he failed in getting elected for the parliament. Many times I have wondered why he always fails in his attempts for building a solid presidential campaign. Perhaps he expresses himself in a very involved way. He tends to abuse of complex metaphors when addressing people, so he surely ends up conveying confusing messages. Perhaps his plans and personality are too unusual, especially when compared with ordinary politicians. Perhaps he's simply too good to be a president.

The idea that Antanas would be an excellent president but that he has no chances whatsoever seems to be a very widespread one. In the current campaign, he has formed a coalition with other two former mayors of Bogotá. Not even as a team they have managed to attract people's attention (at least not massively, as reflected by polls). It is sad to realize that they're extremely brilliant people who will never get a chance. Why is that? Well, they always seem to be the right candidates in the wrong election. The current election will be about someone capable of continuing Uribe's right-wing military policies, while correcting the enormous shortcomings in other aspects, such as human rights, foreign policy, poverty and health coverage. Antanas proposes a government based on education, respect for life, and a change in the culture at every level. All of this must sound like out of place for the regular voter who wants to see the leaders of FARC dead or captured. (Not surprisingly, the guy who ranks first in the polls is Juan M. Santos, former ministry of defense and despicable human being.)

It is even more disappointing to realize that most likely every country has its own Antanas: decent, competent politicians that have no chance of getting elected. Antanas (and all the others like him) represent another facet of the failure of democracy we witness these days.