THE ORIGIN OF THINKINGOLEM

ThinkinGolem was born on initiative of two researchers, Giuliano Pistolesi, cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, and Mario Paolucci, physicist, which worked in on Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Agents systems for many years within research institutions. Among several institutes within they made research and developed their knowledge and skills on advanced technology there were the Italian National Research Council (CNR), the Italian National Institute for Statistics (ISTAT) and the Italian National Institute for Advanced Technology, Energy and Environment (ENEA).

ThinkinGolem is what has been currently defined as a commercial spin-off, sprout from the research domain to which the company is still strongly linked.

Other people joined the first core of these two researchers. Those people came from different scientific domains, such as Physics, Psychology, Mathematics, Engineering, all linked together in that interdisciplinary scientific branch known as Artificial Intelligence. The opportunity to widen the number of collaborators came from the first prize won by ThinkinGolem at the I Edition of the Concourse for Young Companies organized by EduNet/SMAU'99, interested in young enterprise projects based on Advanced Information Technology, which move founders to choose the name of the project.

On the basis of that first core of collaborators, ThinkinGolem opened a virtual interaction space with education and training purposes, the Virtual Laboratory, devoted to spread knowledge about technology which represents the know-how of the company and opened to everyone interested in intelligent systems.

Here follow profiles of the protagonists of the ThinkinGolem project.

Giuliano Pistolesi

Giuliano Pistolesi, class 1968, is the co-founders of ThinkinGolem and currently Vicepresident. He coordinates several research and application projects about Java Technology and Intelligent Agents-based Interfaces. He got a M.Sc. in Cognitive Psychology and a Ph.D. in Medical Informatics. He is also lecturer of Informatics at the Faculty of Psychology 2, University of Rome "La Sapienza". He is interested in Evolutionary Computation, Cognitive Science and Technology, namely, Intelligent Agents in Human-Computer Interaction. He published on several international journal, among which Cybernetica and IEEE: Transactions on Reliability.
go up

Mario Paolucci

Mario Paolucci, class 1968, is the co-founder of ThinkinGolem and currently President. He coordinates several research and application projects about Java Technology and Intelligent Agents-based Simulation Platforms. He got a M.Sc. in Physics and is getting a Ph.D. in Telematics and Information Society. He is also research fellow at the Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology of CNR, where is involved in several european projects such as FIRMA, AgentLink, Exystence and RASTA. He is interested in Social Science and Software Engineering, namely, UML and Java. He published on several international journal, among which Adaptive Behaviour and the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.
go up

The Golem

The origin of the Golem (which means shapeless matter in talmudic Hebrew), the mudman who was the star of tales of Oriental Europe Rabbi for many times, can be found in a passage of Talmud that tells about God's Creation.
    Since the XI century, the legend of Golem was spread in Germany, Poland and Boemia. According to those tales, Rabbi who know the Qabbalah ancient arts should have been able to cast Golem: the rough mudmen should have been animated by signing the alif, mem e thaw symbols on their foreheads. Those symbols can be read as emeth, "Truth", and they are cabalistically similar to those composing the name "Adam". The Golem should have been employed for humble work because they were substantially indestructible. Notwithstanding they hadn't a truly will, because of the mind control of the Rabbi caster, with the time they could become indipendent, autonomous. In that case, the Rabbi could destroy them by deleting the alif symbol from the forehead, since the remaining symbols were red as meth, "Death".
    The Golem was the star of both some dramas and movies, among which that of Paul Wegener on 1920 (Der Golem wie in die Welt kam), that is commonly considered a masterpiece, and some gothic tales and novels, like those of G. Meyrink on 1915 (Der Golem), and of E. T. A. Hoffmann and E. Wiesel on last century.
    It is worthy to note that a thinking Golem is therefore something that is different from Rabbi legends, and that can be red in a modern perspective: the artificial man embodied with its own autonomous mind. And this is one of the probable realizations of the joined research of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.
    In this future vision is enclosed all the meaning of the term we choosen to name our company: ThinkinGolem, from thinking Golem.
    By the way, the name can be red as "designing Golem" too, which represents the objective and main activity of our company, if we consider technological Intelligent Agents like modern Golem.
go up

BACK