I meet Prof. Talamo to the Casale, his laboratory on the campus of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, where he concentrated his creatures. First among these is the University Foundation INUIT.
ESC: why did you choose this name for a University Foundation?
Talamo: I need to start a little from far away. The idea comes from the vocation of the research group that has promoted the constitution. We deal with highly interdisciplinary research involving not only the scientific aspects but also social and cultural rights in general. The basic theme, however, is the set of skills border on Information Technology and a strong specialization Digital Identity. The concept of Digital Identity is not just one aspect of a technical nature. Concerns the way in which each of us interacts with a changing world, constituting community of individuals who aim to be all close to each other. In this way you are changing the organizational forms and is emerging a new sociological reality. And so we come to the Inuit, a small community of people living in Greenland and who need to counter the hostile environmental conditions steeling with each other while remaining strongly united a people that is based on social solidarity.
ESC: So the analogy is between a population that has been perhaps a little ‘back but perhaps because of it is closer to the model of digital identity that the Foundation is studying, an oxymoron.
And what does INUIT to address these issues so complex?
Talamo: First of all we help our University to carry out the task of relating the outside and then the so-called Third Mission. We help to tackle complex and interdisciplinary projects in the ICT, Bioinformatics, and more generally for a new vision of Biology in a Digital World. In these terms, we live in the Botanical Garden of the University with whom we have a fruitful research and simultaneously develop relations with neighborhood committees that surround our university trying to build consensus on social and cultural objectives that expresses this University.
On security issues we have many projects underway and many patents. We are talking about safety of the individual, in the dualism between privacy and security, where these concepts do not have to think of them as mutually exclusive, but rather as a fine line that must be managed to minimize the amount of information to be exchanged.
Research on these issues, we use high-profile collaborations, among which I am pleased to include that with Management Innovation, to target projects with an international dimension that allow you to express the important body of knowledge of the Foundation INUIT.
