Cori, Latina, Italy.
Archive for the 'photoblog' Category
Last Saturday we spent some time in Besançon, in France. It is a lovely city. Downtown is a pedestrian area with lots of shops and restaurants. Here are some pictures.
Utrecht is a great city! It has the atmosphere of Amsterdam with some more charm. The canals are a bit wider with some sidewalks on each side. I loved the place.
Trying to recover from the jet lug I took a walk in San Jose (CA) downtown. The city seems to be relaxed and cosy.
Tags: chi2007
The Swedish furniture company IKEA has understood that the success key is to make the costumers’ shopping experience like play. The transformed the showrooms in gigantic playgrounds where grown-ups can spend their time. One of the recent add-on I noticed was a desk-sized construction kit to compose your kitchen. Each wooden brick has a magnetized back surface that is used to put it in place in a kitchen model board. All the bricks, of course, have scaled-sizes of IKEA furniture elements.
Very smart!
Finally in Villars for the Alpine Rendez-Vous. It quite exciting to be here and to meet again friends and the CSCL community. It is nice to see the human-side of great researchers. In the first part of the week I’ll be working on the mobile learning workshop participating in hands-on on media authoring and future technologies brainstorming.
Green is definitely the photoblog that I prefer. The navigation is simply flawless and the pictures are astonishing. Enjoy!
P.S. Its about green stuff …
Just before leaving the States, we could not miss this one: a trip to Hawaii to enjoy some sunshine and the sea. It is difficult to tell what is most astonishing of these islands: they are a true paradise! Words a useless in some cases and this is one of them …
Yesterday, I attended the Geographical Information Retrieval workshop, which was part of the SIGIR conference. There were lots of interesting papers, some of which are very close to my thesis’ interests.
This workshop will address all aspects of Geographic Information Retrieval – that is the provision and evaluation of methods to identify geographic scope, retrieve and relevance rank documents or other resources from both unstructured and partially structured collections on the basis of queries specifying both theme and geographic scope.
As an overall comment I can say that although we are on the third edition of this event, this particular discipline is still struggling to find its natural audience and support. In most of the cases the results are only partial or superficial even because there are no dataset around that we can play with. (A notable exception is this GeoCLEF2005)
My notes of the talks are in the extended section (or here).
Tags: human computer interaction, information retrieval
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This week end we visited Canon Beach, in Oregon. It was truly one of the best w.e. ever here in America. The landscape was astonishing. We spent hours on the beach, playing with the sand, walking, bird-watching. It was a great emotion: our first time facing the Pacific ocean (my foot in the water). The water was freezing, I couldn’t believe that people were swimming in that cold.
On Saturday, we ate at the Lumberyard, a nice and cosy restaurant. We had crab and shrimps pankakes! On Sunday I managed to buy a kite that I am planning to fly next Saturday. We found this nice place called Pinky’s Kite Factory: they had tons of different kites and it was very hard to choose.
This last week end we visited Portland. It is a nice city: lots of things to see and not chaotic at all. We did some shopping although most of the shops are closed on Sunday. The cool thing is that they do not apply the VAT for the goods. We rumbled around the city for the most part of Saturday, ending up on the park facing the Williamette river of Downtown. We had dinner at the “three degree restaurant“, on the river side. Funnily, the food was high quality and the prices were ok, but in Oregon is “considered” fair to leave 18% of tip for the service.
On Sunday we visited the Japanese garden, in the Washington park. After I could had a look at the Powell city of books: one of the biggest bookshops in the US.
Finally I managed to find a couple of minutes to post some of the pictures I took during our last week end in Vancouver and Victoria. The trip started awfully as we had to wait 2 hours in the car due the cue at the Canadian border (Davide was not very happy). Finally we managed to reach Vancouver. We lodged at University of British Columbia. All the student, in this period of the year, spend the whole afternoon doing picnic on the sea side 
. The weather was amazing. The next day we could meet some Italian friends that cooked for us “Gnocchi”: something incredible compared to the “junk” food to which we got used.
We had the chance to visit Vancouver, a truly beautiful city. Lots of skyscraper in Granville but no chaos at all. The air was really clean. On the way to the ferry we spotted Buckminster Fuller‘s dome (one of my little passions), a construction hosting a science museum. On the ferry heading Victoria we spotted some Otters swimming close to the boat.
Victoria was amazing. I could not believe to find so many interesting things to visit and British people all in one place! The Royal BC museum was wonderful as well as the seafood.
This week end we visited the Olympic Peninsula, the huge piece of land in front of Seattle. It was a great experience. We took the ferry from Edmond to Kingston that was worth the price. Then we visited Port Gamble where we could participate in the reconstruction of the American civil war. After we left for Port Townsend a Victorian-style village on the north edge of the peninsula.
In Port Townsend we lodged at the Manresa Castle, home of the first mayor of the village and after center for religious studies of the Jesuit. We ate at Finns [review], a gorgeous restaurant on the seaside. The seafood was excellent. I had Crab cakes and Alaskan wild salmon: yum!
The biggest attraction of this w.e. though was Hurricane Ridge: an American National Park with its visitor center at 5200 foot of hight! The view was just astonishing. We could also hike a bit with the stroller.
Some pictures from our last trip to the Snoqualmie falls (WA). The view was excellent. A nice trip of half an hour from Redmond. The close city of Snoqualmie is also nice. You can visit the North West Train Museum. Unfortunately, junk-food everywhere …. 
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