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Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

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Rosella Gennari wins this year’s “South Tyrol Free Software Award”

Gennari, professor of the Faculty of Computer Science, was awarded today during the SFSCon, the South Tyrol Free Software Conference, at NOI Techpark.

Gennari teaches Computer Programming in the Master of Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Education, Fundamentals of Programming II in the new Bachelor in Electronics and Cyber-Physical Systems Engineering, and is in charge of the Maker Lab course at the Faculty of Computer Science.

This morning, she received the SFScon award at the hands of the President of the Linux User Group, Marco Marinello. Contrary to previous editions, this year’s winner is not someone from a private company or the public administration. In addition to that, Rosella Gennari is the first woman to win the award

Marinello, in his laudation, motivated the decision to award Gennari as follows: “Her field of study is human-machine interaction via cyber-physical devices, which has often led her into schools where she has been involved in both the experimentation of new teaching tools and the training of teachers themselves. With them, she promotes the basic concepts of computer science as a transversal discipline, and does so through 'physical' computation, with open languages and open hardware. She always finds ways to force (obviously in a positive way) users to be conscious users of technology, understanding the general principles, mechanisms, and logic behind digital technologies and not just their exclusive consumption. At university, on the other hand, her courses aim to unleash the creative and design side of students. Among the tools she makes available to them there are always open hardware as a basis, open source as programming languages and libraries, and open data for everything that can be the subject of system integration. In order to encourage this kind of interest outside the academic sphere as well, she helped open the Bitz, the FABLAB at the University of Bozen-Bolzano, and worked to make it accessible to the public, especially to teachers and schools”.

(zil)