Ep. 10: Between great literature and street art
Something extraordinary must have come out of the meeting between prof. Alessandro Ajres, a Polish philologist at the University of Turin, and prof. Grzegorz Olszański, lecturer in literature at the Silesian University in Katowice and a specialist in musical language. Both creative, courageous, looking for interesting topics. Prof. Ajres fell in love with the Polish language, as he says, not at all because of his fascination with Polish women. Well, maybe one Polish woman... Wisława Szymborska. When he read her poem "Two Monkeys by Breugel", he knew that Polish would be the adventure of a lifetime for him. His research involved Herling-Grudziński and the Krakow avant-garde. In Turin, he is the president of the cultural club Polski Kot, which for the past six years has organised the "Slavika" festival devoted to Slavic cultures. In Katowice, in collaboration with prof. Grzegorz Olszanski, explores the relationship between Polish rap and Polish literature. Have you ever thought that the name of the band Kaliber 44 has something to do with weapons? As Prof. Ajres proves, "calibre" does not refer to firearms, but rather to the importance and significance of the problems which the group addresses in its songs. The number forty-four, in turn, is a reference to ... Mickiewicz's "Dziady". No surprise, then, at the (un)obvious love of the Polish language in Kaliber's work and Norwid's paraphrase "(...) to give a proper Polish word to Polish things with hip-hop speech".
Ep. 9: How to make plants more resistant to environmental stresses?
Ep. 8: Decision-making under conditions of uncertainty
The cooperation began in the early 1980s with a meeting at a scientific conference and developed rapidly. In the mid-1980s, Professors Kacprzyk and Fedrizzi published an article on a new measure of the degree of consensus in a group of experts, which initiated a new direction of research in the literature. During this period, Professor Sławomir Zadrożny from the Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, and Professor Franco Molinari from the University of Trento joined the team. The research was launched on computerized group decision support and consensus-building systems that have found their application in municipal planning in Italian cities. The group was also joined by Professor Hannu Nurmi from the University of Turku (Finland). This allowed for an intensification of research, including the analysis and comparison of voting methods. An important result of this cooperation was the organization of the joint Polish-Italian, and then Polish-Italian-Finnish conferences, under the auspices of the Polish Academy of Sciences, alternately in these countries. This fruitful scientific cooperation of Polish scientists, Professors Janusz Kacprzyk and Sławomir Zadrożny, with the Italian and Finish partners, Professors Mario Fedrizzi, and Hannu Nurmi, is constantly developing, which has resulted in over 50 joint scientific papers, many of which appeared in prestigious journals and conference materials.
