In its new version, this website is devoted to my life, my research, and my memory. It is no longer only a place where I gather courses, articles, projects, or professional documents, but an attempt to look, as coherently as possible, at the whole path I have followed: childhood, adolescence, student years, youth, maturity, emigration, the professions I practiced, and the return, through writing, to my own life.
There is here a path through knowledge born from life itself, 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 professions: first of all that of a teacher, then that of a researcher and of an engineer involved in concrete projects, in Romania, in Italy, and in other professional contexts.
I had 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. The time has come, however, to try to look at myself as a whole, with what I have done, with what I have thought, with what I have understood, and with what I may not yet have 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 burdened by complexes. As a child I was very shy, and shyness, especially shyness in public, has never left me completely. In my lectures I often began in a low voice, broken by emotion, with notes in my hand, although I almost never looked at them: I could not abuse the students’ time by making useless pauses. The presentation had to be efficient, but also alive, capable of keeping them focused on what I was saying. The remedy for my complexes was perhaps the students’ attachment and the joy of seeing, in them, the seeds I had tried to sow beginning to grow.
In this sense, the website is also a reconstruction of personal memory. I am trying to place here, in an order that is 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 worksite: a way of understanding, before it is too late, the connection between lived life, accumulated knowledge, and the memory that tries to give them meaning.
Life as a path through knowledge
Memoirs are not for me merely a sequence of personal episodes. They are also an attempt to understand how a way of looking at the world gradually took shape: through reading, through family, through school, through profession, through decisive encounters, and through difficult ruptures. For this reason, the autobiographical pages of the website do not stand apart from research; they accompany it and, at times, help explain it.
Teacher, researcher, engineer
My professional activity had several faces. I was, above all, a teacher: I taught, wrote courses, and trained students and doctoral candidates. I was a researcher, first in theoretical computer science and software engineering, then in medical informatics and digital systems for healthcare. I was also an engineer, involved in concrete projects, software systems, consulting, and professional training for industry.
This website tries to keep these directions together, without reducing one to another. They belong to the same life and to the same need to organize, explain, and build.
Theoretical computer science
The first decade of my teaching and scientific research took place in the 1970s, in the area of theoretical computer science, at a time when the discipline was still taking shape, including in Romania. Automata theory and formal languages, the design of programming languages, especially their semantics, as well as the theory of algorithms and computability were not for me simple extensions of mathematics, but essential tools for understanding computation as a formal process and for later grounding programming. My graduation thesis in mathematics, the courses and textbooks I wrote 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 little local tradition, but essential for the formation of the computer scientist.
Software engineering
Beginning in the 1980s, my research activity focused on modeling the software process and equipping it with integrated development tools.
This direction generated, over time, 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 an endpoint. 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
Since the 2000s, an important part of my work has moved into medical informatics and eHealth systems, mainly connected with the adoption of electronic health records. I proposed concepts such as the virtual health record — a proactive, agent-based version of the electronic health record —, health digital state — a “digital twin” of personal health —, and Smart EHR — a distributed architecture for an intelligent electronic health record integrated into the digital healthcare ecosystem.
In this section I will gradually add articles, presentations, and syntheses concerning the projects and ideas developed in this field.
Artificial intelligence & reflection on knowledge
My recent encounter with artificial intelligence is not, for me, a mere technological curiosity. It extends older questions about language, knowledge representation, models, agents, reasoning, and the relationship between human beings and the systems they build. In this section I will gradually add texts on the history and current 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 several years I have been working on an extensive memoir project, which brings together:
- my childhood and intellectual formation in postwar Romania,
- the years of research and teaching in computer science,
- the experience of emigration and the reconstruction of life outside Romania,
- research into family roots.
The purpose of this website is gradually to become a place where these texts find a stable form: chapters, fragments, and commentaries that give coherence to a life lived at the intersection between technology and the human.
As I complete sections of my memoirs, I will publish here selected fragments and references to printed or digital editions.
Contact
For professional exchanges, questions related to research or projects, or discussions concerning my memoirs, you may contact me at:
E-mail: luca@serbanati.com