Friday, December 5, 2008

Final Presentations - Visiting Venice

Our first final presentation by the "Visit Team"  today was a great success. The audience included Dr. Concato of the Tourism Department of the Venice Provincial Government (former sponsor of WPI teams when he directed the Venice Tourist Board (APT)), plus a representative from the Slovenian Government, interested in a partnership for a European Union project with Venice on the "Divertimi" program developed by the team, as well as two of our long-term collaborators, tour guides Laura Sabbadin and Bruno Nogara.  Unfortunately, our other key accomplices, Prof. Michele Tamma and his Ph.D. student Anna Moretti were busy with classes, otherwise all our primary contacts would have been there.
 The students did a great job in presenting their sophisticated proposal for a personalized web-based tour-planning system, based on individual and group profiles.  If it ever gets EU funding, and the final product is anywhere near as good as proposed, this will be reall "killer app" which I for one would love to use to plan my future trips!