Fabio Roli's Wall: me and my research

This is a quote that was inspirational and instrumental to my life and my research, it is my life quote:
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit".
This quote is the basis of my approach to scientific research.

This quote is usually attributed to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, and I believed that for a long time. But some years ago, thanks to this Medium post, I discovered that this attribution is not fully correct. Aristotle never wrote this exact sentence, but one sentence much more involuted. But all in all, I want to believe that the Greek philosopher would be happy of this modern version of his thoughts.

I like the above quote because it convinced me, early in my career, that doing top research is not a matter of a stroke of genius. “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”, using another quote that is often attributed to Thomas Edison. The above quote was the starting point for a long reflection over the years about the importance of good habits and soft skills for doing top research. This was also the motivation for the creation of a short course on “Effective habits and soft skills for successful young scientist” that I offer on each year.

In short, I could summarize my approach to research and life in five sentences:
•    we are what we repeatedly do;
•    doing top research is not a matter of a stroke of genius;
•    good habits and soft skills are super important;
•    your brainpower is nothing, or may not be enough, if you don’t control it and channel it properly;
•    you should focus on the process, which you can control, rather than the result, which is subject to luck.

Credits: the title of this page is fully inspired by this great article of the great Richard Hamming.

Curriculum vitae

 

MY QUOTE OF THE MONTH
Motivational quotes that inspire me

"We should focus on the process, which we can control, rather than the result, which is subject to luck".
Puzhong Yao, The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective, 2017

 

I like a lot this sentence. To me this sentence is related to the wider concept of “regression to the mean” that is very important in science and life.
Don’t be anxious about immediate results is not easy at all, but it is really the road to success and happiness.

NEWS

  • December 4 and 5 - Kickoff meeting of our new European project TRITON, Generative Automation of Security Penetration Tests, in Larnaca, Cyprus.

  • 13 November 2024 - Very happy to give an invited talk at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.

    My favourite 3 talks

    I gave many speeches in my long career, and I continue to do so.
    These are three recent talks that made me fun.
    The first talk made me fun because I took the liberty to introduce a technical talk telling a story that could appear fully unrelated. I started this talk speaking about one of the science fiction novels that I love (The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle).
    The second talk made me fun because I told the story of my scientific career, and all the people and things that inspired me.
    The third talk made me fun because is about one of my passions, the theory of habits, and how and why habits and soft skills are very important for successful young scientists.

    My favourite 3 papers

    I have been a prolific writer in my scientific career, and I continue to be so. I wrote and have co-authored a lot of scientific papers, but I can honestly say that many of them are not that much memorable…
    Some of these papers have been already forgotten, lost in time, like tears in rain.


    Here I like to list three of my papers that I hope will survive a little bit more, or, maybe, the ideas and achievements of these scientific papers will be discovered and rediscovered again for many times, they weren't novel even when I wrote these papers…

    • Giorgio Fumera and Fabio Roli, "A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis of Linear Combiners for Multiple Classifier Systems", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 27(6), 2005, pp. 942-956.

      My takeaway for this paper: equally weighted combination of predictors is better than the unequally weighted one when the future can be different from the past

    • Battista Biggio, Fabio Roli: "Wild patterns: Ten years after the rise of adversarial machine learning". Pattern Recognition. 84: 317-331 (2018).
      Pattern Recognition Medal in 2020.

      My takeaway for this paper: attacks against machine learning can be mitigated using a proactive approach to design, but modeling attacks relies on known unknowns, while unknown unknowns are unpredictable.

       

    • Battista Biggio, Giorgio Fumera, Fabio Roli: "Security Evaluation of Pattern Classifiers under Attack". IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. 26(4): 984-996 (2014)

      My takeaway for this paper: you cannot make machine learning secure against never-seen attacks, you should do a what-if scenario analysis and the related risk management.

       

      My physical Wall

      I have some posters in my office room, hung on my physical wall. Here some of them hung on my digital wall. All of them are about the theory of habits, one of my intellectual passions.

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