Why a respirator? 😷
As some people like to point out, I wear a high-quality respirator (an FFP3 mask) whenever I am in an enclosed space, because we are in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic (FAQ, wastewater tracking in France), with the risk of a simultaneous H5N1 (avian influenza) pandemic apparently increasing day by day. Since most people (including politicians, health care professionals, as well as colleagues and students) have decided to pretend this isn’t happening or that it isn’t a problem, despite all the available scientific evidence to the contrary, I need to take measures in order protect myself and my family. You should too; for further info, see Masks work. Distorting science to dispute the evidence doesn’t and Masks and respirators for prevention of respiratory infections: a state of the science review.
News
- Sign the letter Mathematicians Against the Genocide in Gaza (version française publiée par Le Club de Mediapart avec le titre Mathématiciens contre le génocide à Gaza)
- Published paper: Polynomial-delay generation of functional digraphs up to isomorphism, with Oscar Defrain and Ekaterina Timofeeva
- New paper: Unconventional complexity classes in unconventional computing (extended abstract), invited talk at MCU 2024 and CMC 2024; slides here
- New blog post: Nondeterministic sorting
- They interviewed me about studying Western Armenian at the AGBU Armenian Virtual College
- New software:
funkdigen2, an efficient generator of functional digraphs (see our paper for the theory behind it)
About me
I am a maître de conférences (lecturer) in computer science at Aix-Marseille Université (AMU), France and a researcher at Laboratoire d’Informatique et des Systèmes (LIS) in Marseille, but above all I am a part of the larger community of public university.
I am a member of CANA, the natural computation research group at LIS, and my main research interests are the analysis of discrete dynamical systems and the computational complexity theory of parallel, nature-inspired computing models (such as membrane systems, reaction systems, cellular automata, and more general automata networks). In particular, I currently collaborate with the ANR project Foundations of Automata Networks (FANs), with the goal of investigating their dynamics from a combinatorial and complexity-theoretic point of view. I also organised or co-organised the CANA seminar from February 2022 to November 2024.
I teach at Département Informatique et Interactions (Computer Science and Interactions Department), mostly introductory and theoretical computer science courses.
Until 2017 I was a postdoc at the Bioinformatics Milano Bicocca (BIMIB) laboratory (now Natural Computing Lab) at Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy.
I got a Ph.D. in computer science from Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca in 2012, with a thesis titled The Time-Space Trade-Off in Membrane Computing under the supervision of Claudio Zandron. Part of the research for my thesis was carried out as a visiting Ph.D. student at the Research Group on Natural Computing at Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain.
I also like languages, and by that I mean human ones. I speak Italian as a native language, more or less fluent English and French, somewhat decent Spanish, and have some elementary understanding of German. I am also studying a bit of Arabic and Western Armenian in my spare time. I used to study Latin in secondary school, I think I still remember something about it.
Contacts
Teaching <antonio.porreca@univ-amu.fr>
Research <antonio.porreca@lis-lab.fr>
Personal <antonio@porreca.org>