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With the occasion of having an internship at one of the greatest research facilities in Europe (IIT, Italy), I find myself in the temporary position of being an inhabitant of Genova (Genoa). In this post I will try to describe Genova city as seen through my eyes. From the beginning, I would like to add that I come from a mountain city (Brasov, Romania), so the change is pretty big for me. Genova can be found in the NV of Italy:

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It’s a big city, mainly a sea port. In the center, you can admire some of the local attractions:

- the Aquarium (mostly impressive because of the dolphins, seals, penguins and big sea turtles).

- the architecture of the buildings.

- the light tower.

- that’s it.

Not such a big deal, there aren’t too many sights to see as this is an industrial city. I live in the Medino Potente district, which is full with a lot of colors. People of all races and probably of many nations meet together as Supermakets like LIDL, Castorama or Pam. As much impressed as I am about the cultural mix, as disappointed I am on my conational Rroms inclusion into it. Not trying to generalize this, when passing by then, almost all of them have either begged for some euro, or said some nasty things which obviously I understand but just pretended I didn’t.

So returning to our subject, the industrial part of this city transformed it into a big polluted town. Here you can see huge container deposits, big ships and a lot of places under construction:

The summer smells are strong and not pleasant (with the flowers exception). The weather is sometimes very hot, with temperatures that easily reach 35 C. There are some river channels along the hills. Local fauna (ducks, gooses, some fish and a lot of small lizards) can be found in these areas. When jogging, I spotted a badger.

The only beach I could find is the one at Voltri. I make around 2h from the Institute to Voltri with local transport. Traffic is infernal, Voltri is very far away.

Overall, I wouldn’t live in this city. Too much pollution, heavy smells and traffic flow. But for 3 months, one can discover the Italian lifestyle as seen through Italian eyes.

As the measures previously take to limit spam on our theme viewer were defeated by people that do not understand they waste both our time and theirs, I have decided to put and end to this situation. Thus, we will moderate from now on each theme that is submitted to our theme viewer before it gets released. Also, the  GPL 3.0 migration is complete. All the themes from our themeviewer are GPL 3.0 compliant, authors that want to remove their themes due this reason can do that in their admin panel.

I would also say a big THANK YOU once again to authors that are releasing wonderful themes. Our community salutes you!

Hi MGC blog readers.

As I have already said in a previous post, I have started a Ph.D. thesis in mobile robots. After a few months of work, I can list here my main results, and I will give an update of my situation as well.

First, the articles:

Completed:

Duguleană, M.: An Approach to Solving Kinematics Models and Motion Planning for Manipulators with Mobile Base, RAAD 2009 Conference - Presented

Duguleană, L., Duguleană, M.: New Communication Technologies used for Online Sites’ Marketing - BULLETIN OF THE TRANSILVANIA UNIVERSITY OF BRASOV, VOL.1(50)-2008

Pending:

Duguleană, M.: Towards Development of Brain-computer-Based Human-Robot interaction, DAAAM 2009 Conference

Duguleană, M., Mogan, Gh.: Aspects Concerning a Mobile Robot Cognitive System - BULLETIN OF THE TRANSILVANIA UNIVERSITY OF BRASOV, VOL.1(50)-2008

Now I am having an internship at IIT Genova. Genova is a nice city, but the one thing I don’t like about this region is the extreme pollution and the lack of sandy beaches. My tutor, Mr. Ryad Chelalli has given me the face detection + tracking + robot implementation theme. I hope I can meet his standards.