A view beyond the chronology of a life

These texts are not chapters belonging to a single biographical age. They return to experiences, ideas and concerns that cut across several stages of life and try to give them a broader meaning, at a distance from their immediate circumstances.

Some pages begin with personal relationships and memories; others with my experience as a professor, computer scientist and researcher. A few belong to the research sections, but they are brought together here because they also have a clear memoiristic and reflective dimension.

Chronological reference: 2020–2026 – reflections, assessments and returns to the past.

Memory and the reinterpretation of the past

Some memories do not change as facts, but acquire a different meaning as the person looking back at them changes. These texts explore precisely the distance between what we lived then and what we are able to understand much later.

• 👉 From Far Away – a story about origins, memory and the way larger history enters people’s lives
• 👉 Memories change their meaning – beginning with a question I could no longer ask: two silences, pride, emotional regrets and the meaning time can give to an encounter from youth

Portraiture, art and historical memory

Sometimes an object encountered by chance becomes the starting point for research and reflection on individual destiny, art and history. A portrait can preserve not only the face of its subject, but also a trace of the person who looked at that face and drew it.

• 👉 The Portrait from 1938 – a drawing found in a Roman mercatino, the painter Elfriede Meier-Lanz, and the journey from an anonymous face to Holocaust memory

Music and the memory of listening

Some musical experiences remain tied to an age and a place; others become, much later, a way of thinking about time, patience and inner formation. The pages below keep their chronological place in Student Years and Maturity; others, such as the Richard Strauss page, belong directly to Reflections. They all meet here through the theme of attentive listening.

• 👉 Wagnerian auditions at the Conservatory – George Bălan’s evenings, the discovery of Wagner’s music and a formative cultural experience during my student years
• 👉 Sergiu Celibidache and Bruckner – inner time in listening, patience, sonic architecture and the way late listening can become a form of reflection
• 👉 Gustav Mahler – Between Song, Restlessness, and Farewell –
• 👉 Richard Strauss – a music of reconciliation – on Vier letzte Lieder, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the German language and the serenity of a great farewell
• 👉 What moves us beyond perfection? – Maria Callas, four performances of La mamma morta and the connection with the film Philadelphia
• 👉 Tannhäuser, Between Desire and Salvation – from the film Darclée and memories of Wartburg to reflections on love, desire, and salvation
• 👉 Lohengrin, Between Divine Will and the Freedom to Ask – from the Wagnerian auditions and the Bucharest productions to Rome in 2025: trust, responsibility and the freedom to ask questions

The world, rules and relationships

Reflections born from personal experience, encounters and the difficulty of reconciling freedom with rules, admiration with distance, and closeness with what cannot be fully said.

• 👉 Toward a world without rules – freedom, norms, disorder and the fragility of forms of coexistence
• 👉 La donna è mobile... – a reflection on relationships, emotional memory and uncomfortable truths brought to light by time
• 👉 Friendships on the edge – friendships tested by time, pride, distance and loyalties that are difficult to define
• 👉 The limits of admiration – on the need to preserve critical distance from the people we admire

Memory, history and identity in the technological world

Technology changes not only the tools through which we live, but also the way we preserve the traces of our lives. These pages look at personal and historical memory from the perspective of the digital world.

• 👉 The digital shadow and the light of the future – digital traces, memory, identity and posterity
• 👉 Today, me and technology – my personal relationship with technology, from the first computers to artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence, knowledge and responsibility

Artificial intelligence is for me not only a professional subject, but also an existential one: a mirror of the way we understand knowledge, truth, responsibility and the future of education.

• 👉 Chronology of artificial intelligence, 1943–2025 – milestones in an intellectual and technological history
• 👉 In the colors of positive pessimism – lucidity, cautious hope and the ambiguities of technological progress
• 👉 Dialogue on the future of technology — Between algorithm and wisdom – a conversation about meaning, decision and the limits of computation
• 👉 A dialogue with an artificial intelligence about itself – an exploration of the status, limits and possibilities of artificial intelligence
• 👉 When truth becomes plausible – on dialogues with AI and the risk of confusing plausibility with truth
• 👉 School between memory, method and artificial intelligence – education, intellectual discipline and changing learning tools
• 👉 How a university field is born – the emergence and institutionalization of a field of study

Software engineering: history, future and education

Some pages belong directly to research, but also have a memoiristic dimension: they speak about the history of a discipline, how I understood and taught it, its role in professional formation and its return to relevance.

• 👉 The history of software engineering – a look at the formation of the discipline
• 👉 The future of software engineering – possible transformations of the discipline
• 👉 Agentic AI architecture: the return of software engineering – the renewed relevance of software architecture in the age of intelligent agents
• 👉 FILS: returning to Politehnica – an important institutional and educational stage

Complete index of reflection pages

So that none of the pages announced in this section remains hidden, I bring them together below in a direct list.

• From Far Away
• Memories change their meaning
• The Portrait from 1938
• Toward a world without rules
• La donna è mobile...
• The limits of admiration
• The digital shadow and the light of the future
• Today, me and technology
• In the colors of positive pessimism
• Dialogue on the future of technology
• School between memory, method and artificial intelligence
• How a university field is born
• Richard Strauss – a music of reconciliation
• What moves us beyond perfection?
• Tannhäuser, Between Desire and Salvation
• Lohengrin, Between Divine Will and the Freedom to Ask