Carlo Ghezzi – författare

This book explores research from the researchers’ perspective: why to engage in research, what methods to follow, how to operate in daily life, what the responsibilities are, how to engage with society, and the ethical issues confronting professionals in their day-to-day research.

The book systematically discusses what every student should be told when entering academic or industrial research so that they can avoid going through the painful process of learning by personal experience and lots of errors. Rather than being technical, it is philosophical and sometimes even anecdotal, combining factual information and commonly accepted knowledge on research and its methods, while at the same time clearly distinguishing between objective and factual concepts and data, and subjective considerations.

The book is about scientific research in general and as such holds true for any scientific field. However, it is fair to say that the different fields differ in their research cultures and in their eco-systems. The book reflects the author’s experience accumulated over almost 50 years of teaching graduate courses and lecturing in doctoral symposia at Politecnico di Milano, University of Zurich, TU Wien, Peking University, and at various conferences, and of academic research in informatics (also known as computer science).

This book is mainly intended for students who are considering research as a possible career option; for in-progress researchers who have entered doctoral programs; and for junior postdoctoral researchers. It will also appeal to senior researchers involved in mentoring students and junior researchers.

A major challenge for modern software systems is to become more cost-effective, while being versatile, flexible, resilient, energy-efficient, customizable, and configurable when reacting to run-time changes that may occur within the system itself, its environment or requirements. One of the most promising approaches to achieving such properties is to equip the software system with self-adaptation capabilities. Despite recent advances in this area, one key aspect that remains to be tackled in depth is the provision of assurances.

The need for flexibility and globalization forces enterprises to decentralize their activities and continuously (re)structure their networks of relationships regarding both their productive "supply chains" and their design and innovation processes. The goal of the ArtDeco project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Scientific Research under the FIRB program (funding for basic research), has been to address these issues by proposing solutions from three main perspectives: the organizational perspective aimed at studying how companies work in a network and how their design processes can benefit from collaboration with other companies; the informational perspective focusing on how to acquire relevant knowledge from unstructured information and processes and on how to organize and manage such knowledge; and the infrastructural perspective focusing on understanding how self-adaptive workflows and software systems can help in supporting the dynamic interconnection of enterprises.

The book contains a collection of papers offering an overview of the main results produced by the ArtDeco project. It has been structured into the following four main parts: organizational issues: methodologies, empirical contexts and policies; software methodologies and technologies; knowledge elicitation and management; and management of peripheral devices. It also includes a case study used throughout the book as a reference example.