Mehdi Khrichfa

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trustee

Politecnico di Torino (Italy)

Intern | June -August, 2018

Visiting period at the Berkman Center: Summer 2018

I was born in Saudi Arabia to Moroccan parents, but I have lived in Turin, Italy, since I was 3 years old. As a child I wanted to be a medical doctor or an attorney, but ever since being introduced to computers, through an old MS-DOS machine, I completely changed my mind and got lost in a world full of what at the time to me looked like nothing short of magic.
Given my passion for computers, I decided to attend a high school specialized in Computer Science (technical institute). This gave me a strong foundation in multiple Computer Science topics and a clear path to follow in my university studies. In fact, I am currently studying Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Torino.
At Berkman Klein Center I was tasked with the construction of the NoC Knowledge Platform, a repository meant to aggregate and host the open educational resources produced by the centers belonging to the NoC (Network of Centers). Such resources are obtained by scraping the websites of said centers, in order to realize a self-populating and self-updating system.
Thanks to the activities organized by the Berkman Klein Center staff I had the opportunity to explore new ideas and open my eyes to issues seldom discussed, but nonetheless extremely important, in a strictly technical environment. Working with people from different backgrounds and with completely different interests helped me realize that in order to become a complete computer scientist I cannot forget about everything and everyone affected by my work.