Sun, 12/30/2012 - 18:27

My name, as you may suspect, is Diego Mazzaro. I was born in 1981 and I live in Italy near Vicenza.

I've always been interested in math, mechanics and software development as means to model and understand how things happens, how items works and possibly find how to obtain the best-performing system. Following these interests I graduated in mechanical engineering with a specialization on the automation branch.

No matter which is the field or the specific application, what I like to do is to model the system and, investigating the model behavior, to gain insights about what are the most effective direction to move towards in order to solve the proposed problem and/or obtain better results with respect to the starting situation/configuration. I like to time by time change subject and even field in my works and thought, modeling make me possible to say something meaningful also in fields where I have no experience. Experience is very good but build up experience is far more time consuming than modeling and also well investigated models can tell truth that may be counterintuitive or tricky so that experience itself become an obstacle in the way of explore different directions. I do not reject experience: I think the best results can be obtained when modeling people and experienced people work together.

Among my realizations these are the ones that I think to have been the most interesting:

• Design realization and test of a fault tolerant communication system for a steer-by-wire application as my thesis for Mechanical Engineering (automation spec.) degree. It was a CAN-bus based network system where each node had double redundancy and a watchdog system (instead of classical triple redundancy).
• Design installation and servicing of a HAWT (Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine). The design involved aerodynamic effects (trusts, torques) estimation, structural design, mechanical drawings of all components and assemblies, control system design, assembly, installation, servicing and remote monitoring. This was the main project I managed at my first job.
• Design, test and refinement of a multi-zone uniform temperature control algorithm. It was a multi zone plate that has to be as uniform as possible as temperature. Each zone has own temperature sensor and heaters. As a whole the plate has a set-point temperature but in case of perturbations or in transients it is more important to maintain uniformity rather than respect the set point value (as a per-zone independent control do instead).
• Development of a very flexible report generator for the .NET framework. The report templates consists in html files with some extra tags devoted to define the report section and nesting structure. The report builder objects needs only a template file and a .NET Dataset to generate in just 3 lines of code impressive and extremely flexible reports. Consider the possibilities that are available by having in the built report the possibility to also execute JavaScript to post process anything.

The logo choice for this site, the Squared Nabla symbol ($\nabla^2$), is referred to the Laplace operator: in my opinion one of the most elegant and widespread examples of abstraction that can be encountered in continuous systems phenomena modeling.