mala::home Davide “+mala” Eynard’s website

2012 publications series

I have recently attended the "Promoting your academic profile on the Web" at USI. It was a good workshop (thanks Lorenzo and Nadzeya!) and allowed me to get an idea about how well I am communicating who I am and what I do to the world. As you might know already, I think this is pretty important if your aim is to make your research (or in general your work) open and accessible to everyone.

The introspection that followed the workshop made me realize how often I put doing stuff before communicating it. I mean, of course I do that when I publish a paper, but too often I do not let others know that the paper I wrote exists! For instance, I realized that as of today I had not updated my publication list with any of the work published in 2012... D'oh :-)

For this reason I have decided not only to update that list, but also to write one post for each new paper, making the abstract and additional material available. In this post, instead, I will keep an updated list of links to this year's publications, so you can just watch this page and see when something new has been posted.

2012 publication series:

• Alessandro Inversini, Davide Eynard, Leonardo Gentile, and Marchiori Elena (2012). Destinations Similarity Based on User Generated Pictures' Tags.
• Davide Eynard, Matteo Matteucci, and Fabio Marfia (2012).A Modular Framework to Learn Seed Ontologies from Text.
• Davide Eynard, Alessandro Inversini, and Leonardo Gentile (2012). Finding similar destinations with Flickr Geotags.
• Alessandro Inversini, Davide Eynard. Harvesting User Generated Picture Metadata To Understand Destination Similarity.
• Davide Eynard, Luca Mazzola, and Antonina Dattolo. Exploiting tag similarities to discover synonyms and homonyms in folksonomies.

New year, new you

... starting from the blog theme. Of course I have just downloaded a ready made one, otherwise with my taste you would have probably gotten something painful for your eyes ;-)

New year's resolutions? Plenty. But after last year's ones, my  main resolution is no promises :-). And no creativity-killer posts: I'll try to stay far away from those topics I know will stop me from writing instead of  incentivating me. I'll try to make this fun and useful, first of all for me. And if you find something useful here too, well, good for you ;-)

Fist post of the year, first after a long while... And to leave you with some more food for thought than the one you would have just by reading news about my wordpress themes, here you are:

Alon, Uri: "How To Choose a Good Scientific Problem". Molecular cell doi:10.1016/j.molcel.2009.09.013 (volume 35 issue 6 pp.726 - 728).

Here's the abstract:

"Choosing good problems is essential for being a good scientist. But what is a good problem, and how do you choose one? The subject is not usually discussed explicitly within our profession. Scientists are expected to be smart enough to figure it out on their own and through the observation of their teachers. This lack of explicit discussion leaves a vacuum that can lead to approaches such as choosing problems that can give results that merit publication in valued journals, resulting in a job and tenure."

I found the paper very inspiring and I agreed with most of it. Here are few sentences I particularly liked:

• "A lab is a nurturing environment that aims to maximize the potential of students as scientists and as human beings."
• "The projects that a particular researcher finds interesting are an expression of a personal filter, a way of perceiving the world. This filter is associated with a set of values: the beliefs of what is good, beautiful, and true versus what is bad, ugly, and false."
• "... when one can achieve self-expression in science, work becomes revitalizing, self- driven, and laden with personal meaning."

What do you think about it? I think that this self-expression, this possibility of projecting my personal values in my work is one of the main reasons I have chosen to do it. Of course, this is also constraining me somehow: what happens when I work with others? What if there is a clash of values between me and my collaborators? Finally, one last big question arises: how much is this applicable for other job? Is there a chance for everyone to achieve this self-expression or only for someone? What about those who can't?

Ok, enough food for today ;-) One last link, which you might find interesting if you liked this paper too: Uri Alon Lab homepage, where you can find more materials for nurturing scientists.

Take care, have a great 2012!