Anna Bernasconi, researcher from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano, has won the CAiSE PhD Award 2023. The award was presented to her during the 35th edition of the International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE), which took place in Zaragoza, Spain, from June 12 to 16, 2023.
The young researcher was awarded for her Ph.D. thesis in Information Technology titled “Model, Integrate, Search... Repeat: A Sound Approach to Building Integrated Repositories of Genomic Data”, discussed in 2021 at the Politecnico di Milano. The award consists of a certificate, free full registration to the next two editions of the CAiSE conference, as well as a book voucher for a free selection worth 500 euros from Springer’s printed books collection. In addition, the selected thesis will be recommended for publication as a monograph in the LNBIP series published by Springer.
In her Ph.D. thesis, Anna Bernasconi proposes a conceptual model of metadata and an extended architecture for integrating genomic datasets, and then describes a user-friendly search system providing access to the resulting consolidated repository. Originally conceived to simplify scientific research on the human genome, during the COVID-19 pandemic the model was successfully reapplied to virus genomic data. The availability of conceptual models, related databases, and search systems for both humans and viruses will provide important opportunities for research, especially if virus data will be connected to its host, provider of genomic and phenotype information.
The excellence of DEIB’s research in the field of Information Systems Engineering received further recognition from CAiSE. During the conference, the paper “DOML: A New Modelling Approach to Infrastructure-as-Code” written by Prof. Elisabetta Di Nitto together with Bin Xiang and Galia Novakova Nedeltcheva, both research assistants at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano, was awarded the Best Explorative Paper Award.
The paper introduces a new Cloud modelling language for infrastructure deployments that can address IT infrastructure provisioning, application deployment and configuration at once. The idea behind it is to use a single modelling paradigm which can help to reduce the need of deep technical expertise in using different specialized languages.
