Fabio Carrera @ WPI

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests

My main research interest is emergent systems, especially as applied to urban information systems in support of municipal maintenance, management and planning.

I have recently founded two research laboratories at WPI:                                                                                                       

 

  1. City Lab.
  2. Emergent Systems Lab

 

Every year, I supervise several student research projects connected to the two labs – from MS theses to undergraduate Major Qualifying Projects to On-Campus Interactive Qualifying Projects.

Academic Activities

Full-time faculty member of the Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division

Recent courses:

Ř       Preparation courses (ID2050) for WPI Students going to Bangkok, Thailand, Boston, Massachusetts, and Venice, Italy.

Ř       A Computer Science Course (CS3043 )entitled “Social Implications of Information Processing”.

Director of the Venice Project Center since 1988.  Produced over 100 studies for Venice on Preservation of Natural and Cultural Heritage and on Urban Sustainability

(if you have a fast connection, you can try to look at a very exhaustive yet very large PowerPoint presentation about the VPC).

Director of the Boston Project Center since 1997.  Produced over 25 studies for Boston on a variety of municipal topics.

Recent Publications

City Knowledge: An emergent information infrastructure for sustainable urban maintenance, management and planning.

MIT Doctoral Dissertation, September 2004.

City Knowledge as key to understanding the relation between waters and stones in Venice.

In a Cambridge University book on Flooding and Environmental Challenges for Venice and its Lagoon: A State of Knowledge 2003, Cambridge, UK, in press.

Community Participation in Planning: Using GIS and Public Input to Envision Urban Change in ‘Real Time’, with R. Krueger, J.Farmer and D. Benoit.

NESTVAL Conference, Portland, Maine, 15-16 October, 2004.       

Growing the Tree of Knowledge: extracting informational returns from the maintenance of trees in Cambridge, Massachusetts ,

Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Management of Urban Maintenance, Venice, Italy, April 2005.  In press.

Making History:  an Emergent System for the Systematic Accrual of Transcriptions of Historic Manuscripts. 

Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition.  Seoul, South Korea:  August 29-September 1, 2005.  Paper submitted for review.

A sustainable information infrastructure for the maintenance of the inner canals of Venice,

Proceedings of the 2005 URISA Conference (Urban and Regional Information Systems Association), Kansas City, October 9-12, 2005.  Abstract submitted for review.

Free Traffic Knowledge: Semi-automatic Traffic Data Accumulation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with J. Schreiber.

Proceedings of the 2005 ACSP Conference (Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning), Charleston, SC, October 27-30, 2005.  Abstract submitted for review.

From plan-demanded Data to plan-ready Information to plan-demanding Knowledge, with Lorlene Hoyt.

Journal of Urban Technology, April, 2005.  In preparation.

Homo Eruditus:  the next step in our evolution.  From hunter gatherers of urban data to farmers of city knowledge.

Environment and Planning B, April, 2005.  In preparation.

Recent Presentations

From “Plan-Demanded” data to “Plan-Ready” information to “Plan-Demanding” knowledge: building an infrastructure for urban maintenance, management and planning.

ACSP-AESOP Conference, Leuven, Belgium, July 2003.

Recent Research Proposals

The Impact of Tourism on the Quality of Life of the Citizens of the Historic Center of Venice, Italy.

Fondazione ENI Enrico Mattei, December 2004.

 

Contact Information

last updated: March 21, 2005