Giorgio Bonvicini

BookBooks was my first real project: a website with a purpose, which I designed and realized. It started as an exercise to learn PHP and SQL, then, as time passed, it became more and more functional.
Its purpose was to get students wanting to sell or buy used school books in touch with each other: every user could define a list of books he/she wanted to sell or buy, so that any other user wanting to sell or buy a book could reach them.

These are some of the features which were available:

• Book search among all user lists by title, author, editor and price.
• An internal chat and the possibility to send email to other users through the website so as not to disclose the user personal email address on first contact.
• Saving searches and get daily/weekly notifications about new results.

The website is not online anymore since 2017 and I never published the source code because, no matter how proud of it I was, it was a patchwork that merely held itself together.
Also, I wanted to keep the costs down to absolutely zero as I was not practical of hosting and domain names, so I used a free shared hosting, which in turn greatly limited the tools I could work with.

These are some of the skills I acquired working on this project:

• Basis of PHP and MySQL.
• How to use git and what versioning is.
• What XSS and SQL injection are and how to prevent them.
• How to write a simple PHP API and how to interface with it in Javascript from the front-end.
• How to manage user authentication and sessions.

Tools and languages used: PHP, jQuery, HTML, SASS, MySQL, Sendgrid.

Infiltrate is a society game online to be played in-person (e.g. with friends, or at a party). One of the players is a spy and the other players need to pinpoint him before the time is up.
The game is inspired by Spyfall by evanbrumley which in turn is inspired by Spyfall by Hobby World.

I created this alternative version because I wanted to add and modify some features, like having one of the player serving as the administrator for each game, solving various problem of the other versions.

It is quite an old project: it works, but it is not pretty and could surely be improved a lot. I'd like to revisit and update it, but I lack the time.

Tools and languages used: PHP, jQuery, SQLite.

Google Calendar offers a very interesting feature: an automatically-generated calendar with all the birthdays and events of your Google contacts.
Being as forgetful as I am this absolutely is a killer feature for me, however it has a big limit: it's not possible to set notifications for these events.

Looking online for a solution to this problem I stumbled upon this post on a Google Forum where a user had developed a script to receive such notifications via email using a platform I had never heard of (Google Scripts); the only problem was that the code was old and sometimes raised unexpected errors.
Interested by the opportunities that this new platform could provide, I rolled up my sleeves, learnt how to use it and developed the first semi-working version of this script.
After I shared the updated code on the original forum the project got the attention of many users and of some developers as well, who contributed to gret improvements in the code.

This is the project I am probably most fond of, because despite being a simple script of some hundred lines of code it led me to learn lots of things:

• This was my first open source project to gather such a wide interest among users and developers: I learnt a lot about the importance of code reviews, work distribution, how useful a standard code style can be and various aspects of collaboration that I had never experience in first person.
• One of the first external contributions I merged into my code made the script easily translatable into different languages: this opened the door to lots of users who submitted their translations of the script in various languages, but also to problems related to the added difficulty of managing strings in languages that potentially were structurally very different one from each other.
• Thanks to the translations the script has been used by a great variety of users from all around the world who subjected it to a lot of conditions that originally had not been designed for (e.g. different time zones): adapting the code so as to manage such unexpected situations optimally has taught me a lot about what is possible to take for granted and what is not, when designing a project.

Tools used: Google Scripts, GitHub (for issue tracking and open source collaboration).

This is not a project I created, but one I collaborated to a lot.

In a similar way to Google Contacts Events Notifer, I found this project out of frustration for the lack of features of Windows 10 Virtual Desktops.
When I found it I liked it so much that I decided to contribute expanding it and generally helping its maintainer. My main contributions were implementing more customizable popups, introducing popup support for multi-monitor setups and a general refactoring of the documentation.

Tools used: AutoHotkey

I developed my master thesis during a 6 months international mobility period at the Intelligent Manipulation Lab of the University of Lincoln (UK).

Autonomous Robotic Breast Palpation is an innovative method for early breast cancer detection. ARBP is a very complex and largely unexplored problem: my thesis presents a proof of concept end-to-end framework for ARBP, composed of a deep learning model for path planning from visual input based on Learning from Demonstration and Movement Primitives, a motion control policy based on impedance control and tactile feedback, and some tactile exploration policies for lump detection in soft tissue.

Part of this work was published in a paper at the AAAI-22 conference. A second paper covering the rest of the work was submitted to IROS-22.

Tools used: TensorFlow, PyTorch, ROS