UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI SALERNO, DIPARTIMENTO DI INFORMATICA, ITALY
The University of Salerno has very ancient origins as it is one of the oldest universities in Europe together with Paris and Bologna. The Salerno School of Medicine was founded in the 8th century and was the principal institution in Europe for the study of medicine, reaching its utmost splendor during the Middle Ages. The School marked an enormous step forward in the evolution of medical science and easily fitted into the city of Salerno, which had been thriving economically and culturally since it had been part of Magna Graecia. The university remained active until 1811, when it was closed by royal decree while in 1944 the university was re-opened by king Vittorio Emanuele II, and the Istituto Universitario di Magistero “Giovanni Cuomo” was founded, which became state-controlled in 1968 as the Facoltà. Within a few years
other faculties were founded and they formed the basis of an important university. In 1988, the University, which now has over 43,000 students, moved to the village of Fisciano in the Irno valley, a few miles from Salerno. The Department of Computer Science, a Department of Excellence (officially nominated at national level) has almost 30 years of research and teaching activities (previously called Dipartimento di Informatica ed Applicazioni), being one of the first Computer Science departments established in Italy. The department enrolls 35 full time professors, offers didactic support for Bachelor, Master and PhD Degree courses in Computer Science (about 1600 students) and has a variety of interest in Computer Science, including Distributed Systems, Algorithms, Networking, Parallel Computation, Security and Cryptography, Languages, Formal Codes and Computer Graphics. Within the department, ISISLab is the research laboratory that has been mainly in charge of the participation in the Horizon2020 Project: ROUTE-TO-PA. ISISLab was established 16 years ago. Its research is carried out on a wide range of topics including distributed systems, CSCW and CSCL, information visualization, interactive virtual environments, peer-to-peer architectures and web proxies. Among its activities, ISISLab hosted 12 Ph.D. candidates and more than 130 Master Degree students in Computer Science.
ISISLab has been in charge, as Coordinator, of a European Project (Horizon 2020, “ROUTE-TO-PA: Raising Open and User-friendly Transparency-Enabling Technologies for Public Administrations”, € 472,500). He has been involved also in other European programs (IST-2005-028027 ,“Lead: Technology- enhanced learning and problem-solving discussions”,
EU VI Framework, €394.155). Moreover, he has been involved in various research projects funded by regional government (Centro Regionale di Competenza per lo Sviluppo ed il Trasferimento dell’Innovazione Applicata ai Beni Culturali e Ambientali, € 453.373,86), and national programs (Fondo per gli investimenti della Ricerca di Base (FIRB), Ministero della Università e della Ricerca, €520.000). Nowadays, the ISISLab Laboratory is coordinated by 2 Full Professors, 1 Associated Professor and 1 Assistant Professor (Researcher). Moreover, it hosts almost 15 Master Degree students, 8 Ph.D. students and other members of the staff (with Postdoc or research fellowship positions).
Vittorio Scarano is Full Professor of Computer Science and co-director of ISISLab. He received in 1995 the PhD in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Naples (Italy). After visiting as Research Scientist the University Eotvos Lorand in Budapest (Hungary), the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (USA) and Mount Holyoke College (USA), he is (since 1995) at the University of Salerno, first as Assistant Prof., later (2001) as Associate Prof. and now as Full Prof. (2019). He is the author or co-author of more than 120 papers in internationally refereed journals and conferences of IEEE, ACM, etc. and he has been Deputy Director of the Department of Computer Science. He is responsible for the remote teaching of the Departiment, in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Maria Angela Pellegrino is a researcher and lecturer in Computer Science, currently a tenure-track researcher at the University of Salerno. Her expertise spans data quality, open data, semantic web technologies, and educational technologies. She has actively contributed to EU-funded projects, leading and joining initiatives on collaborative patterns, cybersecurity education, and smart city design. She maintains active collaborations with international institutions, advancing research in data science and digital innovation.
Bimed
Biennial of Arts and Sciences of the Mediterranean Association of Local Bodies for Educational and Culture (BIMED) is an association composed by local authorities and institutions working in the field of education and culture. Its purpose is to determine opportunities for meetings and exchanges between the Mediterranean areas and Europe. The interested areas are history, art, music, dance, foreign languages, education and training in general. This is an institution whose primary purpose is to improve the methods that are put in place within the school and in the social sphere aimed at qualifying the contexts by considering the inclusion, equality and peace, brotherhood, legality. Bimed is a training institution accredited by MIUR, the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (Prot.N. A00DGPER 6495-4 /
08/2011). It is also an institution that certifies linguistic skills and computer skills. Its main purpose is to improve cultural skills and persistent pragmatic attitudes in disadvantaged social areas. Bimed operates in direct correspondence with what has been issued by the European community on the basis of active citizenship. This means that the institution is committed to the dissemination of the eight key competences on which it imposes a commitment of particular relevance for what regards the listening competence, fundamental for restoring equilibrium in the interaction between peoples. In the national and international field Bimed has more than a thousand schools that work in interaction with the institution around the optimization processes of the training offer. Bimed also has relations with a lot of local authorities and institutions committed to affirming the value of legality and inclusion as determinants of the development and qualification context.
Bimed works mostly with those so-called marginal and internal areas that represent, to the state, a weakness of the Mediterranean euro system and which can, on the other hand, become the role of ancient sea and Europe. Bimed has been organizing Exposcuola since 2000, the exhibition of the comparison between the training proposals of Europe and the Mediterranean, with more than 200,000 visitors at the University of Salerno. At national and international level Bimed has more than thousand schools that work in interaction with the institution around the processes of training optimization.
Bimed also has relations with a lot of local authorities and institutions committed to affirming the value of inclusion as a determinant of the context development and qualification. Bimed works mostly with those so-called marginal and internal areas that represent, at the moment, a weakness of the European system. The Association has a consolidated experience in initiatives and activities aimed at all age groups, with particular reference to the issues related to the eight key competences and to a ninth: the listening activities. Here are some of the projects implemented by Bimed over the years:
- W children, Erasmus+ project of Bimed with Pegaso University and schools from 4 different countries. WIN is the acronym of Writing for inclusion and european citizenship. The project is based on the transfer and implementation at a European level of an innovative good practice called “Relay of Creative Writing and Legality” which aims at providing students the necessary instruments for reading, writing, doing and being during the academic curriculum.
- Exposcuola
- South School Park
- PazzJam
- Relay of Creative Writing and Legality
Andrea Iovino, a graduate in Literature and Philosophy, specializes in Mass Communication and Art History. He is currently director and president of the Biennial of the Arts and Sciences of the Mediterranean (BIMED) which is an association with legal personality accredited to the Ministry of Education, Universities, and Research (Italian: Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca, MIUR) as a Training Body for Teachers. Engaged in the field of associations in favor of legality for years he has been dealing with writing as a fundamental tool for growth and for the optimization of school. He has published several titles for Franco Angeli Editori and for other publishing houses with texts and articles relating to pedagogy.
Giovanni Del Sorbo is responsible for Relay of Creative Writing and Legality, Community projects, management and analysis international cooperation projects.