When: Thursday, 21 May 2020 – 15:00
Where: Microsoft Teams
Speaker: Prof. Alfonso Pierantonio
Abstract: Starting a career in research is one of the most uncertain professional ambition in modern societies. Besides the technical obstacles of becoming a world-class expert in a specific topic (you have to!), it presents a diversity of daunting (psycho-social) difficulties that might be conducive to harmful consequences. The talk is informal in nature and tries to reflect the speaker’s experience at the beginning of his career and later as the mentor of students and postdocs. Besides expected definitions about what research is or should be, it tries to discuss how students often tend to adopt the wrong idea of having ‘perfect reasoning.’ and how this might lead to frustration and feelings of low self-worth. The talk also considers additional aspects, including empiricism as a popular tool for persuading the mentor and the typical mistakes one should avoid in her/his ‘dialogue’ with the mentor.
The talk has been given already as keynote at the STAF Junior Research Conference 2019 (“Aut tace, aut loquere meliora silentio”, cit.).
Short bio: Alfonso Pierantonio is professor in Computer Science at the Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, Italy. His current interests include Model-Driven and Language Engineering, including co-evolution, model management and analytics, bidirectionality, and metamodeling. He has been the general chair of STAF 2015 and is the designated general chair of MoDELS 2022. He is in several organizing, steering, and program committees of many international conferences. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Object Technology and member of the editorial board of the Journal on Systems and Software Modeling. He published more than 140 papers in international scientific conferences and journals.