Aut tace, Aut Loquere meliora Silentio
                        (and the Likes)

                                                  Alfonso Pierantonio

                                          Universit degli Studi dell’Aquila
                                         alfonso.pierantonio@univaq.it



Keynote Abstract
Starting a career in research is one of the most uncertain professional ambition
in modern societies. Besides the technical obstacles of becoming a world-class
expert in a specific topic (you have to!), it presents a diversity of daunting psycho-
social difficulties that might be conducive to harmful consequences. The talk is
informal in nature and tries to reflect the speakers experience (as a computer
scientist) at the beginning of his career and later as the mentor of students
and postdocs. Besides expected definitions about what research is or should
be, it tries to discuss how students often tend to adopt the irrational idea of
having perfect reasoning. It also will consider empiricism, as a democratic tool
for entering research, and the language as a barrier for those who do not speak
English as a first language. The final remark will be about silence as a beneficial
or pathological aspect of both researchers and mentors.


Short Biography

                       Alfonso Pierantonio is Associate Professor in Com-
                       puter Science at the University of LAquila (Italy) and
                       Visiting Professor at Mlardalen University (Sweden).
                       His research interests are in Model-Driven Engineer-
                       ing, Language Engineering, and Software Engineering
                       with a specific emphasis on co-evolution, bidirectional-
                       ity, and model analytics. He has published more than
                       120 papers in international journals, conferences, and
                       workshops. He has been general chair of STAF 2015,
                       PC chair of ECMFA 2018 and on the organizing, steer-
                       ing, and program committees of many international
                       conferences. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of
Object Technology (JOT), on the editorial board of the Journal on Software and
Systems Modeling (SoSyM), and in the advisory board of Science of Computer
Programming.




Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).