One of the goals of the community of Politecnico di Milano is to support, also financially, the best students through scholarships.
Some of the scholarships are financed by external institution, such as the Andrea Poffe Fellowship for Young Talents, which is supported throught the Fondazione Poffe, established in memoriam ofAndrea Poffe, Alumnus of Mechanical Engineering who passed away prematurely in 2020 at 40 years old.
Andrea Poffe founded Zero Gravity (Credits: Corriere della Sera)
“When Andrea suddently passed away, a support network around him spontaneously started a fundraising campaign and we reached 45 thousand dollars in a few days. And we thought to offer scholarships to help talented students like him, to have other people like Andrea in our lives. It will be offered every year and we plan to expand the program with other donations " says Fabrizio Fantini to Corriere della Sera .
The scholarship, intended for a high school student, will start from the 2021/2022 academic year and will be awarded on merit, financial needs and entrepreneurial ambition. The coverage of university fees will be 100% for the entire three-year course of study at the Politecnico di Milano and more than 80% of the tuition for accommodation and extracurricular activities at the prestigious Collegio di Milano.
Do you wish to launch a campaign to establish a scholarship? Visit our section on the website dedicated to the donation options of Politecnico di Milano. Visit the website
Leafing through the pages of MAP we will travel from the classrooms of the Politecnico to new planets to be explored together with the main characters of this issue.
We will learn more about Alumni Companies , such as the one of Alessandro Pedretti, inventor of a anti-Covid fabric, and of the Alumni Gabriele Natale and Marco Caglieris, each carrying the Politecnico for the seven seas in each own way. We will travel to the Silicon Valley with Paolo Sacchetto (from Apple) and we'll go to Mars with Marco Dolci, responsible of the under-robotic system of the rover Perseverance.
We will sneak into the laboratories of the Politecnico di Milano, to witness the first interaction between light and matter, to take a ride on one of the most innovative driving simulators in the world and to find out how a bridge is tested to be safe over the years. We will read about many research projects funded by Alumni and the community around the world.
Social innovation through" humanly right "technology, to build a sustainable future for our world, is not an unambitious goal ... but we get there by working together, Polytechnic and Alumni: in Milan, in Italy, all over the world ... beyond… towards the borders of the Solar System, as you will read in the journey of these pages designed for you, written with you. .»
– Enrico Zio |President of the Association of the Alumni of Politecnico di Milano
Rector's Delegate for Alumni and individual fundraising at Politecnico di Milano
Since the first prototype of blockchain was proposed in 2008 with Bitcoin , the technology has evolved significantly from public distributed ledgers to private alternatives (or semi-private) that can be adapted to different uses.
The evolution of Blockchain will be at the center of the Digital Talks of Tuesday April 20th, organized by the International Paris Alumni Chapter: “Blockchain : liberté et egalité ”.
During the webinar we will try to identify, both from a technological and legal perspective , a series of issues that have been raised by the introduction of a revolutionary technology such as blockchain within traditional business schemes.
WHAT IS BLOCKCHAIN?
blockchain can be considered as a quantum leap from distributed database technology; in fact, it allows to share a large register of transactions that are read, validated and stored in transaction blocks linked together, which form a chain of blocks - that is a blockchain .
The majority of blockchain applications integrate the technology to reach goals of:
decentralization,
transparency and traceability
automation and scheduling
The decentralized logic , proposed by blockchain technology, aims at replacing some actions reserved to a trusted intermediary ( trusted third party ) with pieces of code that execute transactions in a programmed and automatic way.
In this context, it is essential to identify the responsibilities of the parties that interact through blockchain transactions executed on time or in a programmed manner (the so-called smart contracts).
In the legal field, the contractual relations between the parties must analyze and describe in simple language the pieces of code that characterize the blockchain protocols used for the exchange of assets on blockchain (crypto-assets).
LEARN MORE AT THE DIGITAL TALK
Il digital talks “Blockchain: liberté et egalité” sarà un’opportunità per conoscere meglio questa tecnologia e l’applicazione dei noti smart contracts. L’appuntamento è per martedì 20 aprile, alle ore 18.30.
Gaspare Gori , lawyer of the Paris and Rome bar - co-head of corporate M&A, head of new technologies at CastaldiPartners and Marianna Belotti , Alumna of the Politecnico, vice president of APP, CIFRE CNAM student and engineer at Groupe Caisse des Dépôts.
Moderator: Giuseppe Sangiovanni, Alumnus Politecnico, treasurer of APP and partner of Linkers, M&A Director.
A robot that becomes a virtual personal trainer : it's not science fiction, but Gymnasio , a device that uses artificial intelligence to monitor the positions of the human body during training.
The startup behind the project has been funded by three Alumni of Politecnico di Milano and two Alumni of Politecnico di Torino, and is among the winners of Switch2Product, the program that champions innovative solutions on the market, new technologies and new business ideas and is supported by Politecnico and from Polihub.
The team met in Alta Scuola Politecnica, during the entrepreneurial program 'Pioneer' of the School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation (SEI) of Turin in a project in collaboration with Sprint Reply and supervised by Prof. Barbara Caputo (PoliTo), and by Prof. Cesare Alippi (PoliMi).
The objective is twofold: to make safe and personalized training accessible to as many people as possible and to revolutionize the home fitness market, which has had a surge during the pandemic .
Credits: www.gymnasio.it
Credits: www.gymnasio.it
HOW DOES GYMNASIO WORKS?
Gymnasio is able, thanks to the 3D camera and artificial intelligence algorithms , to correct movements and posture, manage personal records, track progress and give precise feedback during training.
Credits: www.gymnasio.it
Starting from Pepper , the first version of the device with the appearance of a humanoid robot, the Gymnasio team then modified the device with more compact and accessible forms , ideal for training at home in times of pandemics.
“The pandemic played a fundamental role. We will not be able to replace the empathy of a human: we want to give an alternative that can be purchased by everyone and that can be used at home. " declares to TG1 Daniele Gusmini , Alumnus of Automation Engineering and Control Engineering and CEO and co-founder of the start up.
The product, still in the prototype stage, thanks to its small size can be used anywhere and in the future it will be available on the market thanks to a subscription .
In questo Digital Talks, organizzato assieme a Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, è stato approfondito il tema sempre più attuale della vita nello spazio, guardando al ruolo che il design può avere nel migliorare le condizioni di permanenza e di lavoro degli astronauti e nel proporre metodi e strumenti per affrontare condizioni ambientali estreme trasformandole da limitazioni in opportunità.
Ne hanno parlato la prof.ssa Annalisa Dominoni e il prof. Benedetto Quaquaro, Responsabili del corso di Space Design “Space4InspirAction”, Scuola del Design, Master of Science in Integrated Product Design. Moderato da Ing. Daniele Bignami, Project Manager e referente Collana Springer “Research for Development”, Fondazione Politecnico di Milano
The "5 per mille" donations that reached Politecnico di Milano are destined to high social impact research projects: environment, energy, communities, urban regeneration, fragile population and developing countries were some of the themes touched by our researchers through the years.
This year projects benefiting from these grants have had an important focus on health protection. In 2020, Politecnico was able to make around 500 thousand euros from "5 per mille" donations, financing a total of 5 new projects starting in the coming weeks. We will also look more into the projects on MAP number 9, due out in April . Let's have a first look at them together!
BAMBI|Balloon Against Maternal BleedIng
The goal is to design a kit that fights post-partum hemorrhage (PPH) , making the device cheaper and more practical than those currently used.
The goal is to get a social patent and at a cost of $ 5 , which will make the device affordable even for low-income countries. In addition to being cheap, BAMBI must be fast and easy to use because, in the most severe cases of bleeding, the woman can lose half a liter of blood per minute.
BAMBI could represent a life-saving solution in all those countries and contexts where it is difficult to access timely treatment.
The project involves the departments of Chemistry, Mechanics and Design.
Coltivare_Salute.Com | Cities and Health Centres for Resilient Communities
The project aims to enhance the role of the Community Health Houses (CdS) , which are structures on the Italian territory, halfway between the hospital and a treating doctor, designed for less serious patients.
The potential of these health facilities is very high and could have a strategic role in local medicine, to support hospitals and clinics in the management of patients who are not in emergency; however, at the moment the Houses of Health are little used.
Some researchers from the Polytechnic have opened a local co-design table in the city of Piacenza , where they plan to build a new Casa della Salute and experiment with new elaborate solutions.
The project involves the departments of Architecture and Urban Studies, Architecture, Construction Engineering and Built Environment, Management Engineering and Design.
HANDS | Health AND urban Space in Chamanculo, Mozambique
The research promotes innovations aimed at mitigating the structural sanitary vulnerability of the inhabitants of the Chamanculo district in Maputo.
To do this, HANDS proposes to activate a "Social Laboratory" dedicated to the production of Polichina , the sanitizing liquid Made in CMIC ( we talked about Polyquin here ) which will allow, in addition to sanitizing, to reduce the waste of drinking water, with savings of over 95%.
The second objective is to transfer technological skills to local stakeholders in the field of waste management and energy production on an urban and domestic scale.
The project involves the departments of Architecture, Construction Engineering and Built Environment, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Energy and Chemistry CMIC.
MakingMEV | Developing a multiple ventilator for pandemic emergencies
MEV - Multiple Emergency Ventilator is a emergency ventilator that can support 10 patients breathing simultaneously, with one pressure intrinsically safe maximum inspiratory breath (Ppeak) and which prevents mechanical ventilator damage.
The research project aims to create the first prototype, validate its functionality in the laboratory and analyze its potential for transfer to the clinic.
SAFER project | New technologies for securitiy and efficacy of respiratory support during emergencies and context with few resources
SAFER also deals with respirators , in this case the goal is to create a personal respiratory device (for one patient only) to be used outside the ICU that is simple, robust and not so expensive.
To achieve it, innovative materials, new technologies and 3D printed spare parts will be used, which will facilitate supply in times of emergencies and in the case of limited resources, such as in low- and middle-income countries. The forecast is to create a prototype , test the performance, usability and scalability of the project.
The project involves the departments of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Mechanics and Chemistry.
POLISOCIAL AWARD: AN INSTRUMENT IN ITALY FOR RESOURCES WITH HIGH SOCIAL IMPACT
Funded research projects are selected each year through a competition of proposals, the Polisocial Award . First in Italy among academic initiatives of this type, it aims to support and launch research projects and an ethical approach to academic work that enhance the social impact of polytechnic skills, with a view to sustainability over time and with the 'goal of giving space to young researchers.
“The new DHL Express Italy hub in Malpensa represents the first of three projects we are developing in Italy for the German company. This project aims to combine the enlightened vision of the company into tangible projects, introducing a new way to conceive and experience logistics: not just a place dedicated to sorting goods but an integrated hub that promotes the culture and mission of the company. , through highly evocative, as well as highly efficient spaces ".Massimo Roj, Alumnus of Architecture of Politecnico di Milano, describes the new hub of DHL Express inagurated in Malpensa and realised by Progetto CMRof which he is CEO and founder.
In almost thirty years of activity, Roj has spread - together with Progetto CMR, one of the leading Italian companies in the integrated design sector - Italian culture and good practices of international and sustainable architecture. The project in Malpensa is the first of other gateways that are going to be realised by DHL in Italy.
Con oltre 50.000 metri quadri di progetto, 110 milioni di euro di investimento e più di 1000 dipendentithe new operative structure of DHL has become the fourth biggest in Europe and the more sustainable and technologically advanced one, developed in its entirety in BIM.
Located in the south part of the Malpensa Airport, it has a "T" structure that will host a logistic hub, a wharehouse of 12.000 square meters and a factory on two floors and office spaces, more than 7000 square meters with a panoramic rooftop, rooms for meetings and for customer experience.
The characterizing element of the project is the presence of the Connector, a space that allows visual continuity between offices and warehouse and the creation of a sort of "agora" easily accessible by anyone who works in the building for moments of break and network.
One of the major elements of technological innovation is the material used for the casing, composed of triple-chamber alveolar polycarbonate : a light recycled and recyclable material, which allows the illumination of indoor environments through natural light, with considerable energy savings, and which at the same time guarantees excellent thermal and acoustic insulation.
Ann 2 it is a two-seater aircraft of the Stovl type, ie a short or vertical take-off and vertical landing, it can travel up to 600 km at a speed of 300 km per hour. It is built in composite materials also taking advantage of 3D printing, has hybrid power, can be driven in autonomous mode.
Its developer is Lucas Marchesini, Alumnus of Areonautical engineering at Politecnico di Milano, founder and CEO of MANTA AIRCRAFT, describes Ann2: "To some it may seem like a car with wings, but in reality it has little to do with a car. It's more similar to an airplane", but is much smaller than a plane and is able to take off and land in very small environmente (or vertically) A plane almost suitable for urban environments, which is one of the directions in which the areonauthical industry is moving towards.
In the future, aircrafts of this type could be used in the transport of goods and people as well as to facilitate city mobility, being used as couriers and flying taxis; but also for search and rescue operations, surveillance (for example environmental) and medical transport, which are all operations now carried out by helicopter with very high costs. Grazia Vittadini, CTO Airbus, also talked about it in MAP # 5 .
Credits: Lucas Marchesini
Ann2 is in the testing phase: The flight tests of the prototypes in 1: 3 scale are underway while from 2022 the first prototype in real size will take off.
“2020 will be remembered as a complicated year, but also as a time of great change. A long year in which we wrote a page of the university's history. That is why I thought it was right to leave a trace of what we lived and to share in a simple and honest way our experience of a great Italian university: Politecnico di Milano "
The book, a dialogue between the Rector and Ferruccio De Bortoli, focuses on the difficulties that Italian universities faced in 2020 and was presented live in the Paolo Grassi Theater in Milan as well as live streamed on the Facebook page of the Politecnico.
During the presentation, the authors retraced the events of the past year that placed Italy in front of challenges that can be faced- according to the Rector - by investing in education, in particular university education .
Credits: Politecnico di Milano
STARTING FROM KNOWLEDGE: WHERE WE WERE, WHERE WE ARE GOING TO BE
2020 has been a very complicated moment for Politecnico di Milano and for all Italian universities: the management of the emergency pushed our University to close physical classrooms and to open online ones for 45,000 students.
"Every word spent in this book is dedicated to the students of the Politecnico di Milano and our universities"
"Starting afresh from knowledge" is also a programmatic manifesto that claims the central role of the University in the training of young students, the future of our country.
In this regard, the debate on the division of incoming funds is fundamental.
An approach that presupposes the enhancement of the differences between universities, but also to ensure that they form strategic alliances between them, giving students the opportunity to build their university careers anywhere, online and offline.
The goal is to create flexible professionals who grow "with a sharing of knowledge, in particular between the humanities and scientific and technological sciences".
A CHANCE TO CHANGE
"Starting afresh from knowledge" is a book that focuses on the great changes that are underway, and that the pandemic has accelerated: school - now too often forgotten -, work and new professions, emerging technologies, projects for cities and the role of universities in the socio-economic context, the growth of the territory."
An opportunity to restart from competence and rethink the future from the foundations, something that can only be done by returning to believe and invest in the value of knowledge, to face the great challenges of tomorrow.
Digital Talks in lingua francese del 1 Aprile 2021 organizzato dal Chapter Internazionale Alumni Politecnico di Milano Parigi.
Se sei un manager, un consulente, un imprenditore o semplicemente un sognatore avrai avuto l’occasione di dover condividere un idea con altre persone. il successo o fallimento delle tue idee non dipende direttamente da quanto siano brillanti, bensì da quanto sei bravo a condividere il tuo entusiasmo con gli altri.
Una presentazione efficace nella pianificazione e nell’esecuzione ti renderà molto più visibile e cambierà il modo in cui sarai percepito all’esterno.
Ha partecipato al Talks l’Alumnus Maurizio la Cava, co-fondatore e CEO di MPC Presentation Design Consulting S.r.l.
On April 8 they were guests of the Digital Talks “ Design for life in space ” Annalisa Dominoni and Benedetto Quaquaro , since 2017 responsible for Space4InspirAction at the Politecnico , the first and only Space Design course in the world, in collaboration with ESA, the European Space Agency. The webinar was also an opportunity to present the book “ Design of Supporting Systems for Life in Outer Space ", by Dominoni, published by Springer.
Credits: caimi.com
"I like to define designers as creator of problems as well of solutions, generating innovation and bettering the life of people, in space and on earth." says Dominoni in an interview to Wired
Design for space often means adapting existing technologies for a new paradigm:innovate through shape and function connecting innovation and technology
Looking at the future in terms of space cities and stations but with a close look on the needs of the present: design space means to think concretely at "improving the quality, the performance and the efficiency of people in orbit".
According to this principle Dominoni has designed a system of intra-vehicolar clothing (to wear in the International Space Station and within space vehicles) that is addressing all the parameters of comfort, hygene and efficacy with anti-bacteria textiles that are also thermo-regulating and able to adapt to the surrounding environment (we have also discussed about the the topic also on MAP #7)
"Design places the human being at the center and tries to interpret its needs in the most sustainable way: if an astronaut lives and works in a comfortable environment, and with more efficient equipment, his performance increases, and can determine the degree of success of a mission. "“
The designer who designs for space must have the ability to predict, be able to imagine his product in an unknown environment: for example, how will it react in orbit, in conditions of microgravity? "The difficulty lies in the fact that these particular conditions are often not reproducible in the laboratory and it is not possible to experiment on Earth during the conception phase", explains Dominoni to the Alumni (we also talked about it with Manuela Aguzzi, Alumna of Prof. Dominoni and first designer "Instructor of astronauts", in issue 3 of the MAP).
WATCH AGAIN THE DIGITAL TALK OF APRIL 8TH, 2021
During the event, the role of design was explored as a way to improve the conditions of permanence and work in orbit and in proposing methods and tools to address the extreme environmental conditions and transform them from limitations into opportunities.
This website uses cookies. This helps us analyse data and ensuring that we give you the best experience on our website. More information is available on our Privacy policyOk
