Marco Cioffi Personal Blog Site

I have just updated the blog which is up since 2004…

My first two weeks in US have been very hard, but at the same time extremely rewarding.I am posting a draft version of the article I am writing for the Alta Scuola Politecnica (link) on Network Modelling theme. I will update soon the site and I will post the final version as well as the software and a brief how-to make you own social network analysis.This is the abstract of the article:Network theory concerns the study of graphs as representations of relations (both symmetrical and asymmetrical) between objects. This subject is extremely interdisciplinary, in fact, one could apply network analysis to social, technological, and natural real world situation. The study of a network can give interesting insight of the system as a whole. In social network analysis, for example, one could find which individuals are connected to others identifying the social dynamics of the group, the leaders, the lonely individuals, the closed circles and so on. This paper presents a survey on the network theory, in particular, it focuses on social networks. Moreover, using a pragmatic prospective it tries to apply these concepts to a creative and interdisciplinary community, such as the one formed by ASP students.

Applying social network analysis to the ASP informal community

I wrote this paper as a student of the course of Software Engineering at Politecnico di Milano taught by Prof. Carlo Ghezzi. The following is the abstract of the article:
Factors like the interconnection, the heterogeneity and the high dynamism characterize ICT systems like software, services or nets. The management of such systems, consequently, becomes particularly complex and expensive. The autonomic computing defines an architecture which promises to pull down costs of maintenance of ICT systems defining an architecture in which each entity can self-repair, self-configure, self-optimize and self-protect itself. This paper represents an overview of the new paradigm, in which we go through the definition of the conceptual elements of the architecture, the standards, the technologies available and some examples of applications.Sorry this article is available only italian.

Autonomic Computing

I wrote this paper as a student of the ASP (Alta Scuola Politecnica, link). The following is the abstract of the article:

Traffic congestion is nowadays one of the biggest problems of
livability of cities. The continuous growth of number of vehicles and
the difficulty to use funds effectively to improve the capacity of the
road is bringing bad times to the local administrators. Mobility
managers are in crisis while they are choosing which prohibition to
apply to improve the fluidness of cars’ flow. The motorists, as usual,
are not happy with the continuous rise of new constraints to their
freedom. Consequently, new models that act to control the demand rather
than to eliminate the demand are rising up. This paper describes
methods for the demand control, in particular road pricing and the
recent credit-based mobility system that promise to create a virtuous
circle that self-adjusts the demand while it preserves the motorists’
freedom.

Credit-based mobility system

I wrote this paper as a student of the ASP (Alta Scuola Politecnica, link). The following is the abstract of the article:
Nowadays the marketplace is extremely dynamic and competitive, the
continuous requests of innovation and the following creative
destruction is bringing bad times to the management. The corporate
leaders are in crisis while they are tackling the problem of human
resources reorganisation and if the profits of corporations are
increasing, the stress caused by high level of work is rising too.
Consequently, the model of the worker is crossing a new era; it is
changing from a single manual-worker entity to a networked
knowledge-worker entity. This paper describes how the organisations are
trying to address this process, analysing different approaches to the
management of organisation it presents real case studies augmented by
mean of historical perspective. A proper conception of the organisation
can foster and promote valuable changing and innovation inside firms
while it preserves the human dimension.

Download the paper.

The organisation in the era of knowledge workers

I just made a simple utility to add directly an event from iCal file to Google Calendar. I did it because I do not want to use a calendar application (like Outlook or SunBird), I just want to have a small utility to import an iCal file to Google Calendar. To use the file simply drag and drop the ical file into the vbs script icon. You could also associate ical file (.ics) to the google-ical-cal.vbs application, in this case the file will be open automatically and will be transferred to your gmail account. Please note that depending where you are living you should change the timezone (line 33 to 37). I also added two small examples on how to access google calendar from VBScript and JavaScript, I hope you find it useful. To download the application right click and save as…

I completed a presentation for the course of Robotics 1 at Politecnico
di Milano with the Prof. Gini Giuseppina. I worked on an implementation
of the Q-Learning for the Lego Mindstorms.


Download the slides in english!

Robotics 1 Cioffi

Me
and my friend (Guglielmo Roelfsema) have presented a seminar for the
course of Robotics II, with Prof. Gini Giuseppina at Politecnico di
Milano.
In this work, we have used Lego Mindstorms to realise a robot that can
stand-up using dynamic control theory, balancing the gravity force
using motors. It was really cool and very funny to see that our robot
moves without falling down. Anyway, this is only a prototype…

Download the slides and the video!

	Robotics Cioffi-Roelfsema
	Robotics Cioffi-Roelfsema (DivX video)

The primary measure of success of a software system is the degree to which it meets the purpose for which it was intended.
(Nuseibeh&Easterbrook ‘00)

If
you look the toon you notice that it is dramatically true. I think that
this picture could be used as a metaphor for each course of software
engineering, and it is a very good example of the first cause of
software failure: the poor requirements.

In an hypothetical model, the process of software production goes over two distinct phases.
In the first one, called verification, we find an answer for the question “Are we doing the product right?” (is our software bug-free?). In the second one, called validation, we find an answer for the question “Are we doing the right product?” (is our software what the user asked for?).

The two phases are ideally distincts but they can merge and iterate several times, at every step, or at every release.

Finally,
I think that languages for specification are a good tool to solve this
problem, but they are so heavy to be used in common projects. As
examples I suggest you to visit the “Petri Nets World” (link) portal and the “Alloy” website (link).

This
is the project for the course of Software Engineering II, with Prof.
Carlo Ghezzi at Politecnico di Milano. In this article, I explain the
differences and the analogies between two kinds of paradigms, the
Agent-Oriented paradigm and the Service-Oriented paradigm. I sketch
also the two main instances of each paradigm, FIPA for Agent-Oriented
and Web Services for Service-Oriented.

The main claim is that,
in the modern era of on-line composition and orchestration of Web
Services, we need some paradigm that can fit very well in dynamic and
impredictable situations; in shorts if we want to achieve a high degree
of autonomy and intelligence of services maybe we can use the
Agent-Paradigm to models these situations.

Download the article

Web Services and Agents