I was born in Saudi Arabia to Moroccan parents, but I have lived in Turin, Italy, since I was 3 years old. As a child I wanted to be a medical doctor or an attorney, but ever since being introduced to computers, through an old MS-DOS machine, I completely changed my mind and got lost in a world full of what at the time to me looked like nothing short of magic. Given my passion for computers, I decided to attend a high school specialized in Computer Science (technical institute). This gave me a strong foundation in multiple Computer Science topics and a clear path to follow in my university studies. In fact, I am currently studying Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Torino. At Berkman Klein Center I was tasked with the construction of the NoC Knowledge Platform, a repository meant to aggregate and host the open educational resources produced by the centers belonging to the NoC (Network of Centers). Such resources are obtained by scraping the websites of said centers, in order to realize a self-populating and self-updating system. Thanks to the activities organized by the Berkman Klein Center staff I had the opportunity to explore new ideas and open my eyes to issues seldom discussed, but nonetheless extremely important, in a strictly technical environment. Working with people from different backgrounds and with completely different interests helped me realize that in order to become a complete computer scientist I cannot forget about everything and everyone affected by my work.
I have been living in San Potito Sannitico for the first 19 years of my life and I have always considered my hometown a crucial element for understanding my personality and my choices. Since I was a child, I have soon expressed a certain interest in the scientific studies and, at the same time, in every kind of creative activity. I graduated from Scientific High School in 2015. In that same year, I moved to Torino for studying Cinema and Media Engineering at Politecnico di Torino. I think that the most important thing I have gained from my studies are stimuli and inspirations of any kind, both for daily life and future choices. To the question “What do you want to do when you grow up?”, in this period of my life I like answering that I would like to experiment new and many intersection points between art and technology. During my internship at Berkman Klein Center in summer 2017, my biggest occupation has been doing research on the educational resources shared by the research centers members of the Network of Centers and available on the NoC Wiki. I found this activity particularly interesting since it has exposed me to crucial topics for our society, allowing me to analyze the visions of some of the most important research centers in the world. Thanks to these countless and continuos inputs and to the collaboration with the other interns, I have had the opportunity to work on other projects, some of which still ongoing.
Francesco Mecca is a computer engineering student at the Politecnico di Torino. While attending the first year’s selective course Rivoluzione Digitale he got in touch with the staff of the Nexa Center. He spent summer 2016 as a intern at the Berkman Klein Center working on the NoC education project. His main interests are programming and free (as in freedom) software. You can find him here: http://francescomecca.eu, https://github.com/framecca
Dario Chaifouroosh is an Energy Engineering student at the Politecnico di Torino. In 2014 he attended the course Rivoluzione Digitale held by Professor De Martin and was given the opportunity to work as a Summer Intern at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University in 2015. In that period, he worked together with the Nexa Center in order to enhance the online presence of the Network of Centers, helping developing the NoC Wiki tool. He is also strongly interested in the Internet of Things applications to energy supply and distribution.
Flavio Giobergia is a computer engineering student at the Politecnico di Torino. While attending the first year's course "Rivoluzione Digitale", he got in touch with some of the Nexa Center's members and, eventually, was given the opportunity of spending the Summer at the Berkman Center at Harvard University as a Berkman intern (a.k.a. Berktern). While there he joined the Geek Cave as a developer, and worked on a few different projects (e.g. Curarium, brkmn, Hei). He is mainly interested in computer security and programming, and is currently exploring the AI world. While not typing on his keyboard, he can be found reading, rowing or trying (and failing) to learn random skills (e.g. that one time he decided he wanted to learn how to knit and gave up not 5 minutes later).
Maria Serena Ciaburri is a student of computer engineering at the Politecnico di Torino. She got in contact with the Nexa Center for Internet and Society attending "Rivoluzione Digitale", a course held by Professor Juan Carlos De Martin. She spent 10 weeks at Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University as summer intern and during this period she joined the Chilling Effects team. As intern, she wrote on Weather Reports (the Chilling Effects blog), and she did research about online defamation’s laws and interviewed Gabriella Colemann (author, anthropologist and professor concerned about hacking and Anonymous).
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