2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

Institute of Fine Arts and CUNY). I went to listen to some survey
classes at Columbia, as a preparation for my own teaching position,
and to many lectures and seminars. I was invited to give a talk in the
Spring at the Rewald Research Seminar at the Graduate Center of
CUNY. Fortunately, many of the Fellows at the Italian Academy this
year were working on early modern Italian culture, so the exchanges
during the weekly seminars were particularly lively and useful; the
encounters with other disciplines, however, were also fascinating.
Needless to say, New York’s artistic collections were an important
component of my stay, both because they exhibit many works
specifically important for my project, and thanks to their general
variety and quality, which allowed me to encounter artworks from
numerous media, cultures, periods and styles.
Itay Sapir takes up a new position as assistant professor of art history at
the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada.
Marco Savoia
My stay at the Italian Academy was the most challenging and exciting
research period in my life after my Ph.D. In these very intense
months, I developed three different research projects in collaboration
with colleagues in the Department of Civil Engineering and
Engineering Mechanics.
The first project, with Prof. Raimondo Betti, concerned the
development of new structural identification techniques in the presence
of uncertain data. Identification techniques are presently widely
used in many science and technology fields. When a numerical or
theoretical model is formulated to describe a physical phenomenon,
some variables must be typically set in order to obtain an effective
tool for future predictions. These variables must be obtained by
using as input data a set of experimental results, obtained in controlled
conditions. In our research we refined a new technique with
the aim of cleaning the data obtained from acceleration recording
during dynamic tests by identifying and removing the additional errors
caused by the instrumentation hardware. We then verified the
greater accuracy of the data after cleaning with reference to some
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