BlogPost #027

(#27) Matteo Bruno - 23rd November, 2023
Sony CSL Rome (Rome, Italy)

Talk recording (Youtube)

RESEARCH TALK
"How compact should my city be?"

Abstract:

The quest for the “ideal” cities was carried on for two centuries by urbanists, wondering how cities “should” look like. Complex systems and the explosion of available data made this quest reappear and boosted it with renewed theories. The 15-minute city, in particular, heralded a new vision for cities where essential services must be easily accessible in less than 15 minutes by walking.. In this talk I’ll examine the feasibility and practicability of this concept in many cities worldwide. I will show how close cities are to the ideal of the 15-minute city by measuring the accessibility times to resources and services, revealing a strong heterogeneity of accessibility within and across cities, with a significant role played by local population densities. Then, I'll show how much a better redistribution of resources and services could heal the inequality of accessibility, highlighting pronounced discrepancies among cities in the minimum number of services needed to become a 15-minute city. This brings evidence to the fact that the proximity-based paradigm must be generalised to work on a wide range of local population densities.

DISCUSSION
"Should I stay (in academia) or should I go (to a company)?"

Abstract:

This is a question that haunts many undergraduate and postgraduate students, or early career researchers. The issues of a lack of stability and the comparatively low salaries are felt by many of us and the alternatives seem a big compromise to our careers. 

I’ll describe my experience working in a research laboratory which is private and funded by a company, talking about the pros and cons. Questions like “how free is it to do research?” or “Do you have to get a profit?” arise naturally and there are some red flags to check when applying to a private research laboratory. 

Anyway, maybe the original question of academia vs company is a bit ill-posed and you should ask yourself something deeper, but it is a hard task to examine the possibilities without fully knowing what exactly comes with them. However, we often tend to forget the possibility to go back and change trajectory.

Have you ever wondered about the pros and cons of research in a company versus academia? In our last seminar, Matteo Bruno gave insight into his experience at Sony CSL Rome, in his talk titled "How compact should my city be?"

In his research, Matteo explores the 15-minute city – a place where important services are within a short walking distance – and its impact on inequality and well-being. He then showed how close different cities are to the 15 min ideal and how their services are distributed.


In the second part of the seminar, Matteo talks about a possible life outside academia. He shares insights from his time at Sony CSL, discussing private research labs, freedoms and constraints, financial aspects, and related red flags in industry research positions.

We went on discussing academia-industry hybrid positions in general, and other positions that we know of (see our blog for a list), as well as length of employment, possibilities for promotion and compromises in aligning your research with your employer.  Finally, here is a list of some hybrid research possibilities that we have heard of:
sonyCSL
GOOGLE
SPOTIFY
META

Additional resources mentioned by Matteo:
whatif.sonycsl.it/citychrone/
whatif.sonycsl.it/15mincity/
openstreetmap.org/

The discussion is still open, if you want to share your opinion leave a comment on this thread! The talk is available on our Youtube channel.