Outstanding second- and third-year undergraduates and first-year Masters students in Informatics and other STEM disciplines are invited to learn about cutting-edge research in computer science. Leading researchers will engage with attendees in their areas of expertise through short courses, seminars, discussions, and informal interactions.
14:00 – 19:00: Check-in
20:00: Dinner
9:00 – 9:15: Welcome
9:15 – 10:15: Matteo Frigo (Lecture 1)
10:15 – 11:15 An introduction to Hive – Coffee break
11:15 – 12:15: Flavio Chierichetti (Lecture 1)
12:30 – 14:00: Lunch
14:00 – 16:00: Study time
16:00 – 16:30: Coffee break
16:30 – 17:30: Seminar: Fred Schneider
17:30 – 17:45: 7th inning stretch
17:45 – 18:45 Seminar: Andrea Lodi
20:00: Dinner
9:15 – 10:15: Matteo Frigo (Lecture 2)
10:15 – 11:15: Hive tournament: First semifinal – Coffee break
11:15 – 12:15: Flavio Chierichetti (Lecture 2)
12:30 – 14:00: Lunch
14:00 – 16:00: Study time
16:00 – 16: 30: Coffee break
16:30 – 17:30: Seminar: Fred Schneider
17:30 – 17:45: 7th inning stretch
17:45 – 18:45: Seminar: Nicola Prezza
20:00: Dinner
9:15 – 10:15: Matteo Frigo (Lecture 3)
10:15 – 11:15: Hive tournament: Second semifinal – Coffee break
11:15 – 12:15: Flavio Chierichetti (Lecture 3)
12:30 – 14:00: Lunch
14:00 – 16:00: Study time
16:00 – 16:30: Coffee break
16:30 – 17:45: 1st Mini Course: HW Discussion
17:45 – 18:00: 7th inning stretch
18:30 – 19:45: 2nd MiniCourse: HW Discussion
20:00: Dinner
9:15 – 10:15: Matteo Frigo (Lecture 4)
10:15 – 10:45: Coffee break
10:45 – 11:45: Flavio Chierichetti (Lecture 4)
11:45 – 12:15: Il Mondo Ortogonale
12:30 – 14:00: Lunch
14:00 – 14:15: Baba Day: A program in honor of Ozalp Babaoglu.
14:15 – 15:15: Seminar: Bill Joy
15:15 – 16:15: Seminar: Michel Raynal
16:15 – 16:45: Coffee break
16:45 – 17:30: Seminar 3: Fred Schneider
17:30 – 18:30: Seminar: Ozalp Babaoglu
18:30 – 19:00: Hive Tournament: Final
20:00: Dinner
9:15 – 10:15: Matteo Frigo (Lecture 5)
10:15 – 11:00: Coffee break
11:00 – 12:00: Flavio Chierichetti (Lecture 5)
12:00 – 12:15: Concluding remarks
12:30 – 14:00: Lunch
Attendance is by invitation only. Required application materials include information about your undergraduate/graduate academic record, and a concise description of your key accomplishments to date. Deadline for applications is 15 August 2025.
You can apply by filling this form.
There is no registration fee to attend, and BOOST will cover food and lodging for all attendees.
Who should apply?
Outstanding second- and third-year undergraduate and first year Masters students in Informatics and other STEM disciplines.
What is the deadline for applications? When will I hear back?
Applications received by August 15 will be considered first. Admissions will be conducted in multiple rounds, with the first notifications sent by August 18 until all available spots are filled. If you don’t hear back by August 18, please don’t worry—your application is still under review unless you receive a notice of regret.
Can I attend Bologna even though I didn’t attend Oropa?
Yes, absolutely!
What if I am available for a subset of the days? Can I attend partially?
Unfortunately, no. Students are expected to commit for the entire duration of the school.
What is the earliest arrival and latest departure date?
Check-in at the Ospitalità San Tommaso d’Aquino will be available after 2:00 pm on August 31. Checkout is by 10:00 am on September 5.
Where are classes held?
At the Oratorio San Filippo Neri, in Via Manzoni, 5, Bologna.
What kind of accommodations will there be?
Students will be hosted at the Ospitalità San Tommaso D’Aquino, via San Domenico 1, Bologna. The foresteria is about an 18-minute walk away from the Oratorio. Typical accommodations consist of a double room, with private bath, TV, and wi-fi.
Do I need to bring a laptop?
Yes. Courses may include coding exercises.
Which language is spoken at the school?
All instruction will be in English.
How many students will be attending?
Approximately 70.
If the above does not address your question, you can contact the organizers.
Ozalp is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bologna. Previously, he was an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. He earned his PhD in Computer Science in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley. His extensions of virtual memory for AT&T’s Unix system, developed during his doctoral studies at Berkeley, became the foundation for a long series of “BSD Unix” distributions. He received the Sakrison Memorial Award in 1982 (along with Bill Joy), the UNIX International Recognition Award in 1989, and the USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993. In 2002, he was named an ACM Fellow. In 2007, he co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO). He has served on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, and Springer Distributed Computing.
He is the President of ELICSIR and the Chair of the Board of the Orthogonal School.
Matteo earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999. His research interests include the theory and practice of parallel algorithms, multi-threaded systems, cache-oblivious algorithms, signal processing, and, more recently, zero-knowledge proofs. He has worked for over a decade in the cloud industry, designing storage and networking systems for some of the leading cloud platforms. His research has earned significant recognition, including the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software in 1999, the ACM Most Influential PLDI Paper Award in 2008 and 2009, the SPAA Best Paper Award in 2009, and the IEEE FOCS Test of Time Award in 2019.
At ELICSIR, he is a mentor for the Orthogonal School.
Flavio is a Full Professor of Computer Science at Sapienza University of Rome, where he earned his PhD in 2010. He has been a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell and a Visiting Scientist at Google. His research spans algorithms, machine learning, and mathematical modeling, with a focus on social networks and the Web. He has received several prestigious awards, including an ERC Starting Grant and the KDD 2015 Best Paper Award. He was awarded the “Best Young Italian Researcher in Theoretical Computer Science” by EATCS in 2014 and has received multiple Google Awards, including two Focused Awards. He has held leadership roles in premier international conferences such as KDD and WWW, and has been part of the program committees of STOC, SODA, PODC, ICALP, NeurIPS, and ICML; he serves as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Algorithms.
At ELICSIR, he is a mentor for the Orthogonal School.
Bill Joy is an American computer scientist, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and a key contributor to UNIX development. Born in 1954, he earned degrees from the University of Michigan and UC Berkeley. Joy created the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) version of UNIX, which influenced modern operating systems.
At Sun Microsystems, he design the Network File System (NFS) and helped design the Java programming language. After leaving Sun, Joy joined venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) as a partner, where he focused on investing in green technology and innovative startups.
In 2000 he wrote a cover story for Wired magazine entitled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” addressing the ethical implications of advanced technologies.
Bill is a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a named inventor on more than 60 US Patents.
Andrea Lodi is an Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion. He is a member of both the Operations Research and Information Engineering and the Computer Science fields at Cornell University. Before joining Cornell, he was a Herman Goldstine Fellow at the IBM Mathematical Sciences Department, NY in 2005–2006, full professor of Operations Research at DEI, University of Bologna 2007-2015 and Canada Excellence Research Chair in “Data Science for Real-time Decision Making” at Polytechnique Montréal 2015-2022. His main research interests are in Mixed-Integer Linear and Nonlinear Programming and Data Science and his work has received several recognitions including the IBM and Google faculty awards. Andrea is the recipient of the INFORMS Optimization Society 2021 Farkas Prize and has been elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2023. Andrea has been the principal investigator of scientific projects (often involving industrial partners) for Italy, European Union, Canada and USA. In the period 2006-2021, he was a consultant of the IBM CPLEX research and development team, developing CPLEX, one of the leading software for Mixed-Integer Optimization.
Nicola is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees (both summa cum laude) at the University of Udine, where he also completed his PhD in 2017. He has held postdoctoral positions at the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Pisa, and worked as an assistant professor at LUISS University in Rome. His research, which earned him a prestigious ERC Starting Grant, focuses on algorithms and data structures for managing and analyzing compressed big data, with applications in bioinformatics. He was awarded the “Best Young Italian Researcher in Theoretical Computer Science” (EATCS) in 2018 and the “Best PhD Thesis” award from the University of Udine in 2017.
At ELICSIR, he is a mentor for the Orthogonal School.
Michel Raynal is an Emeritus Professor of Informatics, IRISA, University of Rennes, France. He is an established authority in the domain of concurrent and distributed algorithms and systems. Author of numerous papers on this topic, Michel Raynal is a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France, and a member of Academia Europaea. He was the recipient of the 2015 Innovation in Distributed Computing Award (also known as SIROCCO Prize), recipient of the 2018 IEEE Outstanding Technical Achievement in Distributed Computing Award, and recipient of an Outstanding Career Award from the French chapter of ACM Sigops. He is also Distinguished Chair Professor on Distributed Algorithms at the Polytechnic University (PolyU) of Hong Kong.
Michel Raynal chaired the program committees of the major conferences on distributed computing. He was the recipient of several ”Best Paper” awards of major conferences (including ICDCS 1999, 2000 and 2001, SSS 2009 and 2011, Europar 2010, DISC 2010, PODC 2014). He has also written 13 books on fault-tolerant concurrent (shared memory and message-passing) distributed systems, among which the following trilogy published by Springer: Concurrent Programming: Algorithms: Principles and Foundations (2013), Distributed Algorithms for Message-passing Systems (2013), and Fault-Tolerant Message-Passing Distributed Systems: An Algorithmic Approach Springer (2018). His last book titled Concurrent Crash-prone Shared Memory Systems: a Few Theoretical Notions has been published in 2022. Michel Raynal is also the Series Editor of the Synthesis Lectures on Distributed Computing Theory published by Morgan & Claypool.
Fred B. Schneider is the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He joined Cornell’s faculty in Fall 1978 and served as department chair from 2014-2018.
Schneider’s research has focused on various aspects of trustworthy systems — systems that will perform as expected, despite failures and attacks. His early work concerned formal methods to aid in the design and implementation of concurrent and distributed systems that satisfy their specifications. He is author of two texts on that subject: On Concurrent Programming (co-authored with D. Gries) and A Logical Approach to Discrete Mathematics. He also is co-author (with R. van Renesse) of chain replication, which is widely used to implement replicated storage in today’s cloud systems. More recently, his interests have turned to system security.
Schneider was named Professor-at-Large at the University of Tromso (Norway) in 1996 and was awarded a Doctor of Science honoris causa by the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2003 for his work in computer dependability and security. The U.S. National Academy of Engineering elected Schneider to membership in 2011, the Norges Tekniske Vitenskapsakademi (Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences) named him a foreign member in 2010, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences elected him to membership in 2017.
In addition, Schneider has testified about cybersecurity research at hearings of the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee (subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats, and Capabilities), as well as the Committee on Science and Technology (subcommittee on Technology and Innovation and subcommittee on Research and Science Education).
Modern distributed systems face inherent challenges in achieving scalability, fault-tolerance, and efficient coordination. This talk explores gossiping, a decentralized communication paradigm where nodes exchange information only with a few immediate neighbors, as an effective approach for meeting these challenges. I will present our work in designing novel gossip-based algorithms that address a range of fundamental problems in distributed systems that go well beyond broadcasting, which had been the initial motivation for gossiping. The problems I will address include dynamic network formation, robust distributed computation, large-scale heart-beat synchronization, adaptive topology management, and self-organizing formation creation.
We discuss how to analyze and estimate the performance of parallel algorithms in terms of “work” and “span”. We show how to express “fork/join” parallel algorithms in the Cilk language. We discuss a simple randomized “work-stealing” scheduler that attains asymptotically optimal performance, and show practical implementation techniques that enable good concrete performance. We extend the basic work/span model to include a memory hierarchy, and we show how to analyze algorithms in this extended setting. We give examples of how a dynamic scheduler
benefits irregular problems, such as alpha/beta pruning in a chess game tree.
Modern algorithms must act in split seconds while seeing only fragments of a massive, ever-changing environment. This mini-course first tackles the expert problem, showing how its classic strategies drive real-world systems—from ad-selection engines that hedge among bidding tactics to news-feed rankers that combine many weak signals without ever over-committing to any single one. We then explore local graph sampling; we will show how a crawler can return near-uniform-at-random nodes in a social network to gauge global sentiment without downloading the full graph. Together, these two settings illuminate the broader challenge of making sound choices when the full input remains hidden.
I came to UC Berkeley CS in 1975 as a graduate student expecting to do computer theory—Berkeley CS didn’t have a proper departmental computer and I was tired of coding having written a lot of numerical code for early supercomputers.
But it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future. Berkeley soon had a Vax Superminicomputer, I installed a port of UNIX and was upgrading the operating system, and the Internet and Microprocessor boom beckoned.
This talk is a brief overview of the last 50 years, of how software hardware and algorithms for numerical and symbolic computing have evolved, about the changes in programming and programming languages, and some thoughts on managing technology and addressing climate change, and especially, looking forward, about the future of scientific and AI computing.
Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) technology is used daily to solve (discrete) optimization problems in contexts as diverse as energy, transportation, logistics, telecommunications, biology, just to mention a few. The MIP roots date back to 1958 with the seminal work by Ralph Gomory on cutting plane generation. In this talk, we will discuss — taking the (biased) viewpoint of the speaker — how MIP evolved in its main algorithmic ingredients, namely preprocessing, branching, cutting planes and primal heuristics, to become a mature research field whose advances rapidly translate into professional, widely available software tools. We will then discuss the next phase of this process, where Artificial Intelligence and, specifically, Machine Learning are already playing a significant role, a role that is likely to become even more crucial.
What do the bits of a computer have in common with the molecules (nucleotides) that make up our DNA? Both are used to store information: while the former encode documents such as images or videos, the latter are the symbols that nature has chosen to program living beings. At the most fundamental level, however, they are both information: we can encode a JPEG using DNA, just as we can store DNA in the RAM of a computer. In this presentation I will show how modern biologists and bioinformaticians translate DNA into bits and how modern computer scientists combine techniques from information theory and data structures to analyze this “digitized” DNA.
This talk presents a short (and partial) history of synchronization in systems made up of asynchronous sequential processes (automata). Among other points, it shows that synchronization (which consists in ordering operations issued by processes on shared objects) has a different flavor according to the fact that the objects are physical objects (such as a printer or a disk) or logical objects (immaterial objects represented by sequences of bits). It then follows from this physical/logical nature of computing objects that mutual exclusion is to physical objects what consensus is to logical objects. The article also addresses recent results on process synchronization in fully anonymous systems (systems in which processes cannot be distinguished one from the other, and where there is a disagreement on the addresses of the shared memory registers.
Cyber-security today is focused largely on defending against known attacks. We learn about the latest attack and find a patch to defend against it. Our defenses thus improve only after they have been successfully penetrated. This is a recipe to ensure some attackers succeed—not a recipe for achieving system trustworthiness. We must move beyond reacting to yesterday’s attacks and instead start building systems whose trustworthiness derives from first principles–laws that relate attacks, defense mechanisms, and security properties. This talk will explore examples of such laws and suggest avenues for future exploration.
Most formal assurance arguments prove safety and/or liveness trace-properties of a system Trace properties are defined by predicates on individual execution traces; hyperproperties are defined by predicates on sets of trace-properties. We illustrate why the added expressiveness of hyperproperties is needed. And we discuss how to verify an important class of hyperproperties, focusing on aspects of a logic for verifying trace properties that would facilitate verification of hyperproperties.
CS departments typically offer courses that focus on specific classes of system artifacts: operating systems, networks, database systems, computer hardware. However, a close look reveals overlap in the coverage of these courses, because they all instantiate a small set of principles for building these various kinds of systems. This talk will discuss what are those principles and what is the essence of “systems” as a subject of study, independent of specific artifacts.
Oratorio di San Filippo Neri, Bologna
L’Oratorio di San Filippo Neri è un affascinante contenitore culturale di proprietà della Fondazione del Monte. Al suo interno si svolgono le iniziative e i convegni promossi dalla Fondazione che, tra l’altro, ogni anno offre alla città un ricco cartellone di spettacoli, incontri, concerti, tutti a ingresso libero. La Fondazione concede inoltre l’utilizzo dell’Oratorio a enti e organizzazioni che ne facciano richiesta.
Qui le informazioni.
L’Oratorio si trova in pieno centro a Bologna, in via Manzoni 5, ed è visitabile il primo fine settimana di ogni mese dalle 10 alle 19.
The ELICSIR Foundation was founded in October 2023 as an Italian non-profit “Ente del Terzo Settore (ETS)” and is registered with the Registro Unico Nazionale del Terzo Settore (RUNTS) as 04154681201.
© ELICSIR Foundation ETS 2025 - All right reserved
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