Meeting, 12 November 2010

Meeting, 12 November 2010

When

  • Friday 12/11/2010, 11:00 - 13:00

Where

  • DEIS Cesena, via Venezia 260, Room "V2".

Who

  1. Ambra Molesini
  2. Sara Montagna
  3. Elena Nardini
  4. Andrea Omicini
  5. Mirko Viroli

What

In this meeting we faced a number of issues. The discussion about each issue was led by one person, and resulted in the identification of a number of notes/conclusions/open issues, which we list in turn.

— Issues of WP6 (discussion led by Andrea)

  • The European Commission requires a medium- to long-term return of investment resulting from granted resources, hence dissemination is a key task: it cannot be done at the end of the project as it happened in past projects, but it should be handled with care from the beginning of this project.
  • The same holds for collaboration, too. It is essential to make project activities organic, facilitating the achievements of results even in earlier stages of the project.
  • Dissemination and collaboration can be seen as two facets of the same problem: they are about interactions with external institutions and between partners. As such, the tools used for one can be likely used for the other, though possibly with different policies.
  • Those tools are mainly the SAPERE website, the SAPERE wiki, and the websites (and tools) of each partner. 
  • However, tools are meaningless without the definition of shared processes to drive, govern and promote intra- and inter-project interactions.
  • To this end, a meeting with Gabriella Castelli (SAPERE webmaster) and Franco Zambonelli (project leader) will soon be organised, with the goal of establishing a collection of procedures and practices for properly exploiting collaboration/dissemination tools, which could promote effective behaviours for all partners within the project .
  • Early ideas on the above processes and practices have been discussed, based Mirko's current experience on posting in SAPERE's and UNIBO's wiki, and on Andrea's experience about those tools.

— Strategy for interactions with other partners on WP1 (discussion led by Mirko)

  • Our goal of creating an early prototypical ecosystem model by the second SAPERE meeting (in January) could be achieved only by starting collaboration as soon as possible with WPs and partners.
  • A right way to do this is to plan the production of a draft (possibly in the form of a position paper) by -- say -- half December, which we could circulate among partners for their feedback, then evolve and refine subsequently.
  • Even though time is tight, we should try to interact from now on, as described below.

Involvements of other partners (GENEVA-WP2, STA-WP3, and UNIMORE-WP4 are those related to UNIBO-WP1) is planned as follows:

  • Matteo will carry on interactions with GENEVA-WP2: at the next internal meeting he will report on his visit at GENEVA, and will accordingly keep involving that partner and gathering their feedbacks.
  • Elena will carry on interactions with STA-WP3: she will soon start discussing with STA about the different views on the semantic framework (which abstract characterisation, which possible incarnation/implementation).
  • In a few weeks, and exploiting our proximity with UNIMORE, we will organise a joint meeting with UNIMORE-WP4 (of course, we will let anybody else know about this meeting asap, so they can participate)
  • Finally, Ambra is expected to eventually (during first year) propose the meta-model, guaranteeing a more coherent and well-documented specification of the byproducts of WP1

— On the natural-inspiration of the eco-law model (discussion led by Sara)

  • We started pointing out that a careful description of what eco-laws are and what they are expected to do is needed.
  • Mirko recapped a possible view over the role of natural metaphors for eco-laws, according to his recent publications with Franco Zambonelli
  • We agreed that Sara, extending her skills and knowledge on biological systems, will take care of studying usefulness of metaphors also spawning physical, chemical and social models.
  • We remarked the fundamental link between Chemistry and Trophic/Social models established in works by Lotka-Volterra (a.k.a. the prey-predator model and its variants): this is the backbone for the whole idea of applying a chemical-like reactions (eco-laws) to sustain the coordination of a pervasive ecosystem.
  • We identified at least two levels of natural inspirations: how such an inspiration can affect the development of the eco-law framework, and then how eco-laws can be used to reproduced nature-inspired self-* properties useful to service ecosystems

— On the next meeting

  • Matteo will report on his visit at GENEVA 
  • Elena will present her current work on the semantic framework of eco-laws