A long time ago, this column used to report a lot of detail of my personal life and of daily news about my work-related travel and activities. The site does offer two modalities for posts: article-type and blog-type; this determines where they appear in the main science20 site (this text is classified as blog-type, so it will be listed in the column on the center-right in the main page of Science20). This built-in feature invited the kind of blogging style I already had before, so when I moved here in April 2009 (gosh, it's been a while!), it was a seamless manouver.

However, over time I learned that those diary-like, non-news kind of writings were good for engagement of people interested in science and curious to know what the life of researchers is like (a bit the focus of the first blog I was engaged in, Quantum Diaries), but were otherwise not very useful in the long term, and they overall contributed to reduce the information content of the column. I also sort of walked away from that mode of writing because I did not find it very stimulating for me. This made the articles I write here a bit more valuable from the standpoint of scientific content, but I do acknowledge that they made this site a bit more dry than it was. 

I still consider myself as a very open person, ready to share my thinking on any topic, politics included, and to make available details about my personal life. So I would have no problem resuming the diary-style blogging, if there was an use to it; what has changed in the past 15 years is that overall the time I can spend on blogs -which includes engaging in discussions in the comments threads, an important component especially when matters other than pure science are discussed- is shorter, so as a zero-sum game I lean toward keeping things the way they are. 

So let me make a sort of temporary straggling from the above path. Here I will tell you in detail how the start of 2023 has been going on, and what in particular is going to happen. 

First of all, I think I did report here earlier about a long trip in South America I had in January and February. The original motivation was to join my wife, who was performing in a contemporary opera in Santiago, Chile. After the end of that, we traveled to northern Chile, where we could use a 50-cm telescope from Alain Maury in San Pedro de Atacama for stargazing, and visited the Cerro Paranal observatory. Then we went to the Galapagos islands for a couple of weeks of explorations. It was really awesome!

Back home, I did not stay put for long. On March 5 I traveled to Lulea, in the north of Sweden, to collaborate with the machine learning group of LTU and learn about neuromorphic computing. I will be here until the end of May for that purpose, but in the meantime, more travel is coming. Indeed, tomorrow I will travel back to my home in Padova for only a few hours, and then fly to Erice, in Sicily on April 11-13, to give a lecture at a PhD School in Machine Learning for HEP. 

Back to Padova for one day, I will have a busy agenda on April 14 -besides a collaboration meeting of MODE, I will have to connect to a Master thesis defense in India, and then visit the Questura of Padova to renew my passport. The day will end with a dinner with a friend and my son and daughter.

On April 15th I will then fly to Rio de Janeiro, for a collaboration meeting of the SWGO experiment. I think I will give a presentation on how to optimize the layout of the experiment there. Then I will be back in Padova on April 22, but on the 23rd I will fly to Calgary, and spend one week in Banff for a workshop, where I will give a talk on how to handle systematic uncertainties in supervised classification. Back to Padova on the 29th, I will then take another flight to be back in Lulea on April 30.

Overall I think this month will be kind of crazy, and a bit too much of moving around even for my taste. I would have much preferred to stay in Lulea, in fact, where I found an exceptional group of colleagues and friends, and where I am learning a lot. My wife has joined me here after some further performances-related travel to Buenos Aires last month, and she will be here for the next 20 days. Fortunately she will have a friend from Greece visiting her, so she won't be alone all this time!

So, here it is - a full page of text devoid of any scientific content. But I have several things to tell you soon: among them, I will soon discuss neuromorphic computing and its promises for the future, where energy-efficient, decentralized calculus and co-location of data and processing will become more and more important. But I will also tell you about the highlights of the school and workshops, if I find it interesting enough...