In its new version, this site is dedicated to my life, my research and my memory. It is no longer merely a place where I gather courses, articles, projects or professional documents, but an attempt to look, in as coherent a form as possible, at the entire road I have travelled: childhood, adolescence, student years, youth, maturity, emigration, the professions I practised and the return, through writing, to my own life.
There is here a path through knowledge, born from the very experience of life, but also a path through scientific knowledge: theoretical computer science, formal languages, software engineering, my encounter with medical informatics and, more recently, reflections on artificial intelligence. At the same time, there is the path of my professional activity, in which the professor, the researcher and the engineer coexisted and complemented one another, in Romania, in Italy and in other professional environments.
Quick entries into the site
For a more direct reading, the site can be approached through four main directions: personal memory, research, teaching activity and professional experience.
I never thought of myself as a whole, as an object worthy of contemplation. I almost always saw myself in fragments: the part I needed in order to justify myself, the part I needed in order to condemn myself, the part I could show and the part I preferred to keep hidden. Yet the time has come to try to look at myself as a whole, with what I did, with what I thought, with what I understood and with what perhaps I have not yet fully understood.
This gesture is not easy for me. I have always been, I do not know exactly why — or perhaps I do know, but do not easily accept it —, a man marked by complexes. As a child I was very shy, and shyness, especially in public, never left me entirely. In my lectures I would often begin in a low voice, broken by emotion, with my notes in my hand, although I almost never looked at them: I could not abuse my students’ time by making useless pauses. The presentation had to be efficient, but also alive, capable of keeping them focused on what was being said. The remedy for my complexes was perhaps the students’ attachment and the joy of seeing, in them, the seeds I had tried to scatter begin to grow.
In this sense, the site is also a reconstruction of personal memory. I am trying to place here, in an order still provisional, the fragments of a life that passed through family, school, university, research, emigration, profession, friendships, loves, losses and returns. It is not a definitive autobiography, but an open construction site: a way of understanding, before it is too late, the bond between lived life, accumulated knowledge and memory as it tries to give them meaning.
A Life in a Few Images
Eight visual milestones, from adolescence to late maturity, open a biographical path that crosses school, university, the department, emigration, family memory and retrospective reflection.
The end of adolescence
Leaving student life behind
The first years in the department
A young doctor in computer science
In Italy, starting again from zero
At home, in Rome
At Predeluț, in the Făgăraș region
Retirement life
Life as a Path Through Knowledge
For me, memoirs are not merely a succession of personal events. They are also an attempt to understand how, over time, my way of looking at the world took shape: through family and school, through reading, through my profession and the people I encountered, but also through separations, failures and ruptures whose meaning was not always clear to me when I lived through them. This is why the autobiographical pages of the site are not separate from those devoted to research and professional activity. They complement one another: personal experience sometimes explains intellectual choices, while professional concerns reveal something of the person who pursued them.
Writing memoirs means, for me, more than recovering facts and arranging them in order. It means returning to them with the distance that age brings and recognising that the meaning of an event does not remain unchanged. Introspection does not always provide answers to questions carried throughout a lifetime. Sometimes it merely allows us to formulate them more clearly and to understand differently why they have continued to accompany us.
Professor, Researcher, Engineer
My professional activity has had several faces. I was, above all, a professor: I taught, wrote courses, and trained students and doctoral students. I was a researcher, first in theoretical computer science and software engineering, then in medical informatics and digital health systems. I was also an engineer, involved in concrete projects, in software systems, in consulting and in professional training for industry.
This site tries to keep these directions together, without reducing one to another. They belong to the same life and to the same need to organize, to explain and to build.
Theoretical Computer Science
The first decade of my teaching and scientific research activity took place in the 1970s, in the field of theoretical computer science, at a time when the discipline was still taking shape, including in our country. Automata theory and formal languages, the design of programming languages, especially the study of their semantics, as well as the theory of algorithms and computability were not for me mere extensions of mathematics, but essential tools for understanding computation as a formal process and for the later foundations of programming. My diploma thesis in Mathematics, the courses and textbooks I prepared at the time, and my first articles were at once teaching exercises and acts of research: an effort of conceptual construction in a field with no local tradition, but essential to the education of the computer scientist.
Software Engineering
Starting in the 1980s, my research activity focused on modelling the software process and equipping it with integrated development tools.
Over time, this direction generated projects, articles and experimental systems, culminating in 1992 with the publication of “Integrating Tools for Software Development” by Prentice Hall — a synthesis of the ideas developed up to that point, but by no means a conclusion. The research continued, expanding into other contexts, with other forms and objectives: new software architectures, intelligent agents, concern-oriented design, digital ecosystems, “digital twins” and aspects of the use of artificial intelligence in software engineering.
Medical Informatics & eHealth
From the 2000s onward, an important part of my activity moved into the area of medical informatics and eHealth systems, mainly related to the adoption of citizens’ electronic health records. I proposed concepts such as the virtual health record — a proactive, agent-based version of the electronic health record —, the health digital state — a “digital twin” of personal health —, and the Smart EHR — a distributed architecture for the intelligent electronic health record integrated into the digital health ecosystem.
Artificial Intelligence & Reflection on Knowledge
My encounter with artificial intelligence was not, for me, a mere technological curiosity. It extended questions about language, knowledge representation, models, agents, reasoning and the relationship between human beings and the systems we were building. In this section I have gradually added texts on the history and present state of artificial intelligence, on its connection with medical informatics and on its possible role in the reconstruction of memory and intellectual dialogue.
Memoirs: The Story of a Life
For more than a year, I have been working on an extensive memoir project that brings together:
- memories of my childhood, adolescence and intellectual formation in postwar Romania;
- the years of study, research and teaching in the field of computer science;
- significant episodes — easier to disclose today — from my sentimental education;
- the experience of emigration and the rebuilding of life outside the country;
- genealogical research devoted to discovering my family roots;
- notes and impressions from my journeys and excursions;
- reflections on people, technology and society, as well as on the sometimes epochal changes I have lived through.
This site is the place where all these texts gradually find a stable form: chapters, fragments, documents and commentaries intended to give coherence to a life lived at the intersection of technology and the human.
In this reconstruction, memory is not merely a repository of the past. It is also the space in which distant events acquire, after decades, meanings they could not have had at the time they were lived.
As the project advances, I publish here new chapters and fragments, together with photographs, documents and other testimonies that complete the story of my life.
Contact
For professional exchanges, questions related to research or projects, or for discussions related to my memoirs, you can contact me at:
E-mail: luca@serbanati.com