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"Alternative" Curriculum
The standard CVs seem rather boring to me. For this
reason I propose here a narrative of my professional
experiences in a way rich of photographic documentation.
Without cover everything, I speak of the main projects
in which I participated. I graduated at 29 years. In the
long years at university I have, thank God, lived very
important experiences as the meeting and the militancy
in a known Catholic movement. In 1975 I was elected to
the Board of Faculty of Engineering, the only Catholic
students representative. I composed songs and played
with great musicians like my close friend Max Aureli. I
worked at the Italo-Chinese Institute as translator from
English. Finally I served the Republic for a year in the
Lancers of Montebello. After graduation (July 1980) I
found soon an employment as substitute professor at a
School for Electronics Technicians. But already in
November '80 I had a so called “scholarship” at the
Gepin, newly established computer company. That meant
that you should work for few liras for three months. On
March 1, 1981 I was hired.
Boom years for computer science in Italy and worldwide. Gepin
Policy: sink or swim. I and my fellow adventurers have
done incredible things, like learning a programming
language in a night or remake from scratch the Forms
Management System of Digital because there was no money
to buy it.
The most significant project of the first period was the
SATCAS Simulator. A system for training flight
controllers developed for the SELENIA Industries. In the
picture of the brochure I'm the one standing playing the
role of supervisor of controllers in training. In this
project I worked as a programmer in a macro-assembler
Selenia built to their NDC-160 computers.
My task was to write software modules that simulates the
aircraft maneuvers: takeoffs, landings, turns, VOR
radial capture, ... I remember the classic 12 hours
working day with my talented colleagues Sandro Stanzani
and Massimo Galimberti in a huge warehouse on Via
Tiburtina. Julia was born in those years, our eldest
daughter, that means nights with little sleep and days
of intense work. The simulator was successfully tested
and sold to different countries: Iraq, South Africa,
Hong Kong. I made another simulator for Selenia: a
system for testing the Skyguard-Aspide, another great
result for my career. Experience with Selenia was
extremely educational and exciting. In those years there
were incredible resources in what was called Tiburtina
Valley: capacity of building real-time computer-based
and complete control of hardware and software. The
Selenia was building computers and writing operating
systems and compilers, as well as the rest: antennas and
so on.
In the meantime the Gepin had taken the distribution of
the first optical memory device interfaced to a computer
that is the Thomson WORM called GIGADISC.
I became the GIGADISC project manager and I was sent to
Paris for ten days to take a course at Thomson-CSF
together with my colleague Gianfranco Romano. It was in
January 1984
Last day in Paris. Visit the Eiffel Tower with air
tickets tucked in my coat
In the same year appeared on the Italian market the
first IBM PC. It was constituted a laboratory for
research and development and I became the Gepin R&D
manager. The laboratory integrated the GIGADISC with the
PC, along with scanner and laser printer. I wrote the SW
in assembler to compress and decompress images to fax
format monochrome gr.III with the Huffman code as only
specs. The lab people wrote the drivers for video,
printer and scanner devices. After few months we put in
place a PC-based system for archiving documents that was
called Metroon by the Gepin technical director and
driving force of all Ubaldo Simonetti. Thanks to Ubaldo
I did my first trip to the U.S. in June 1986. I saw New
York, Las Vegas for the National Computer Conference,
San Francisco and the Silicon Valley to contact a
supplier of printers in Santa Clara.
My projects in Gepin were many and all related to the
management of images and digital audio on personal or
mini computers. Fairly advanced activities in the
software landscape of those years dominated by the
mainframes. We grew up in declared aversion to Cobol.
After the first two years in Gepin, I began to make the
teacher for the new hires. From this work came the
opportunity to teach a course of Computer Science at the
School of Medical and Scientific Journalism at the
University of Tor Vergata chaired by prof. Casciani. I
taught two years with great satisfaction and I left,
unfortunately, when I changed the company I worked for.
In those years people was beginning to think in terms of
electronic publishing and I felt tight in Gepin although
the company now had 300 employees. We know that man is
always attracted by what he doesn’t get and I wanted a
company that had more breathing space. Through a friend
I found the possibility of an interview in Sidac, a
company controlled by SEAT of the Stet group and they
wanted to start their own experience of electronic
publishing by optical memories. There was already active
a business that was producing videodisc projects such as
Galleria Spada.
On January 13, 1987 I was hired in Sidac and my task was
to test the brand new CD-ROM technology. In April '87 my
second son Charles was born. In competition with other
internal groups, I was given the assignment of an
experimental project with the American company called
Online Computer Systems, which had already published a
remarkable CD-ROM called "Books in print". Commissioned
by the Library of Congress, it contained a catalog of
all books published in the U.S. and stored at the
Central Library in Washington. The Online actually
produced a highly efficient information retrieval system
that was used both online and on-disk.
I began to design a prototype with Seat Yellow Pages on
CD-ROM: Europages. On July 4, 1987 I arrived in the U.S.
with my colleague Marco Appignani with the task of
bringing the Europage catalog on CD-ROM. It was an
intense month of work and positive human experiences and
knowledge of the American world.
The online premises of Germantown were in the vicinity
of Washington DC.
With Marco visiting the Aerospace Museum in Washington,
July 1987
In addition to coordinating the project I also was
called to write the software to display the logos of the
companies listed in the catalog. For Seat it was
essential to give a different graphical visibility for
companies to distinguish from those ads free or
charge. When Rick Holt said that the person supposed to
provide the SW chart was not available there was a
moment of bewilderment. The VGA card had just been
released and the Windows operating system existed only
at the experimental stage. I wrote the driver for the
VGA in a mixture of C and MS assembler to handle 16
colors. The CD was printed in America at 3M in
Minneapolis.
I still have the specifications of 3M 1986.
We returned to Italy in early August, very happy. Sidac
had bought the Online CS system and I became responsible
for the SW development of the company. Followed dozens
of CD-ROM catalogs projects. Two projects of all:
Iveco Compact Catalogue
This product went on the market and we continued to
produce it for about ten years until in 12 different
languages. In practice, the product replaced the
microfiche at the IVECO dealers worldwide.
The other project is VIDEOCITTA '
In the late '80s we developed a mapping system with
connected database that, with proper proportions, is
similar to Google Maps.
A brief mention must be given to the technical
documentation area where we carried on projects for
Alcatel, and Italtel led by the colleague Marco Meli
that I helped with passion to success. Projects that
produced dozens and dozens of editions throughout the
'90s.
In addition to numerous visits to the online consultancy
on various projects, in those years I attended many
conferences in the U.S., in particular almost all
editions of Microsoft CD-ROM conference where I
accompanied our sales manager Bruno Cerboni.
Above you see the program cover of the fifth CD-ROM
Conference.
In this photo of the fourth edition (“Seeing is
believing”) Cerboni took a shot of me with the technical
director of Sony in the background. Toshi Doi (father of
the CD) announced during the conference that Sony was
planning a game-console based on CD-ROM. A few years
later Sony released the Playstation.
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Mr. Cerboni began in those years to make contacts for
participation in European research and development
programs. The first project in which we were involved
was Delta and for the first time I took charge of
technology for the Education and Training. We also went
to the headquarters of Philips Eindhoven where they were
still developing videodisc applications. A small
participation in Vasari, the project led by James
Hemsley and the National Gallery in London, was of
paramount importance for my carrier. VASARI opened the
season of the EU technology projects dedicated to
cultural heritage.
VASARI was followed by the project MUSA (Multimedia
Special Action) the first European project of whom I was
the Project Manager. The project involved the Galleria
degli Uffizi by the Department of the Faculty of
Engineering of Florence, who was in charge of digital
images and that was led by prof. Vito Cappellini. The
main achievement of this project was the installation at
the Uffizi in Florence, of a replica of the Vasari
scanner already operating at the National Gallery in
London. It began for me a successful season of R & D
projects in the various programs under the EU Commission
which lasted throughout the 90s. The most important
were: RAMA, Aquarelle, Hypermuseum, Mesmuses. Thus I had
the opportunity to work with the R&D departments and
with the curators of all major European museums: the
Musée d'Orsay and the Louvre, the Pergamon in Berlin,
the National Museum of Scotland, the Ashmolean in
Oxford, the Goulandris in Athens, the Archaeological
Museum of Madrid, the Avignon Museums, the Museum of
Science in Florence. In all these cases I took care of
the image processing and electronic publishing tasks for
the dissemination of cultural information and education
purposes. I had the opportunity to know and work with
publishers such as Marsilio, Giunti, Fratelli Alinari.
Perhaps the most important of all was the Aquarelle
project. Aquarelle created an experimental online
network of museums in Europe at the dawn of the Internet
but in a pre-web era. It was led by Alain Michard of
INRIA (the French research institution that collaborated
in the development of the world wide web, and is member
of the W3C).
I participated in those years in numerous editions of
the EVA Conference (Electronic Visual Arts), at first in
London (National Gallery Sainsbury Wing Theatre) and
then in various locations: Florence, Berlin and Gifu in
Japan.
Meanwhile Sidac had been absorbed by Finsiel, the
largest Italian SW Company, but my activities remained
basically unchanged. Inside Finsiel I had the
responsibility of a production unit called Multimedia
Services which included EU projects and electronic
publishing projects.
A unit that grew to a dozen people divided between the
two listed activities.
In London with representatives of the National Museum of
Scotland Museum and Berliner Museums
Some EVA conferences badges between '94 and '96. First
as Sidac and then as Finsiel
At the London '95 Eva conference I saw for the first
time a website presented by a U.S. researcher. Gradually
we began to migrate on online, as the growth of the
bandwidth made the Internet more suitable for multimedia
applications.
The culmination of this activity was the creation of the
virtual visit to the Uffizi Gallery. Application that
was used to test the broadband Internet in both
satellite (Gamma) projects and Telecom Italy projects.
Particularly in an experimental project called PRISMA /
Endeavour, which first tested the ADSL technology in
Italy.
Presenting the Uffizi Virtual Museum in EVA Gifu -
Japan
It was a presentation of this application to push Paul
Corbò, then director ENAIP a large training institution,
to got me involved in the project FADOL (Distance
Learning Online). Finsiel won both the production design
of the courses that the delivery platform development an
management.
Here is the announcement of Finsiel. The total amount of
the project was about 45 millions of euro.
I was responsible for the production of 1250 hours of
multimedia courses. Without doubt the biggest production
ever in Italy and perhaps even outside of Italy. A
production that saw ten different suppliers involved in
parallel. The coordination of such a project according
to the ISO 9000 quality standard, was a great exercise
in project management. A document server dedicated to
all the sub-contracting companies scattered in Italy was
the focus of the management. The testing with the
customer was influenced by political tensions and was
successfully managed only through the efforts of Mr.
Corbò and the commitment of the talented colleague
Alessandra Fioritto, head of the testing team. Finally I
was called to guide and test the entire FADOL system
(including data center and all staff). Fadol came to
have 12,000 users in 1000 that were connected on average
daily. I left the project in 2002 and was appointed to
work with Telecom Italy task force that prepared the
company project called "Telecom Italia Learning
Services" (TILS). Then they asked me to switch to the
new company. This transition was final in late 2002.
Fadol last act: “Job 2003 conference” presentation at
the conference then the project was killed by
politicians
I survived inside TILS by a mechanism already tried in
the past: give the project more mangy to Brunelli: that
was how I worked from 2003 until 2009 in the e-learning
project CRS-SISS and I was able (almost single) to bill
for 2.6 million euros in the project. In the meantime, I
finished a successful similar project for the consortium
called CARTA IN (Campania region).
I also went back to work in a very nice and interesting
European project called DREAD-ED which was led by TILS
(PM Mrs. Luisa Nigrelli).
TILS was eventually sold to a businessman that "squeeze"
it and led it to the closure.
To get out of these dry I found it convenient to redeem
the years of graduation (a mechanism where you pay for
reducing the years to pension). In this way I could
finally exit from Telecom Italy taking retirement and
starting a new phase.
As a consultant, I returned to work in two European
projects dealing in technology applied to education (Avithed
and Musicc project in the EU program Life Long
Learning). This is for a Milan based company called
E-Live. Through these projects I could contact people
from Eastern Europe nations: Romania, Bulgaria and
Turkey.
At present time I’m also very much engaged with the
activity of photographer, especially of works of art. I
published many photographs on books and magazines and 60
of my shots are sold on the prestigious American catalog
"Getty Images" (see photo section of this site)
I also won a small regional project for my Music
Association The Veleiro Onlus (www.ilveliero.net)
And I do not want to stop here ...
Standard CV
Curriculum
Vitae
Brief description
of the 18 European projects in which I participated
(Italian)
As an example of website built entirely by me (besides
this one) please visit
www.enocioccogelateriabrunelli.it
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