Born in Italy on April 7, 1985, Nicola Fioravanti began programming at age eight and discovered bassoon playing at age eleven. Nicola has always had a strong fascination with computers and art.

In 2007 he gained an honours degree in Music at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland in Basel under the guidance of Sergio Azzolini while playing as principal bassoon at Rome Opera House, Munich Chamber Orchestra, Filarmonica Toscanini and Mahler Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Philippe Herreweghe and Yuri Temirkanov touring regularly across Europe, U.S.A. and Asia. He joined the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari Orchestra in 2007 as a principal bassoon.

During that period, Nicola never stopped to pursue his interests in computer science with a particular focus on vulnerability research and penetration testing. A vulnerability he discovered (CVE-2012-0869 | DSA-2414) led him to start cooperating with F*EX (TIK Universität Stuttgart). F*EX (Frams’ Fast File EXchange) is a service to send big files from a user A to a user B used by the Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC), European Commission Institute for Energy and Transport, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, German Aerospace Center among others.

In 2014 he left the orchestra to create and direct a Centre for Research and Technological Development (MediaLab) at the Opera House in Cagliari. Nicola first designed tantangram, an app for iOS and Android that allows children to compose music without the traditional music notation. Then he designed Semestene, a Google Glass app to allow the audience to interact with Puccini’s Turandot from July 30 - August 16, 2014. This event caught widespread international attention: more than 10 million unique viewers visited the website and the social network profiles of the Opera House in just two weeks. The international media reaction was astonishing with the New York times writing: 'The country that gave the world opera is looking to bring it into the 21st century this week' and The Guardian claiming that 'Cagliari’s plans seem more extensive than any predecessors'; soon followed Wired, the Wall Street Journal and many others.

In 2015 Nicola left MediaLab to direct the 'Learn to code project', a governmental project of the Presidency of the Sardinia Regional Government in partnership with Codecademy, the premier online platform for free coding lessons with more than 24 million users. The 'Learn to code project' is the first governmental program in Italy to teach computer programming to young people in order to create new opportunities for them. The project will bring to all sardinian students the skills required for 21st century jobs and it is the result of a strong desire to promote an actualization in both the contents and the forms of learning.

In 2016 Nicola launched theShukran together with the internationally renowned human rights lawyer Luca Bauccio. theShukran is the social network to say thank you, shukran. It aims to be both a tool for the Muslim world to communicate with the 'outside', and a way for the World to connect with the Muslim culture. theShukran got its first 100k users in just 50 days after the official launch.

In late 2016, after attending a Google seminar, Nicola fall in love with Progressive Web Apps. Progressive Web Apps use modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like user experience being reliable, fast and engaging. Nicola's current work is mainly focused on this way to deliver new user experiences on the web.

In addition to music and technology, Nicola loves to experiment with modern colour street photography. Some of his first photos were published by La Stampa, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica among others. In late 2015 Canon Inc. choosed one of his photos for its worldwide advertising campaign.

Nicola is also a great admirer of the work of Edward de Bono and as a de Bono Certified Effective Thinker is regularly invited to teach Thinking and Lateral Thinking at Universities and Governmental Institutions. An avid reader and lover of literature and art, Nicola is fond of the work of Alvar Aalto, Egon Schiele and the late Richard Strauss. A student of Graphic Design, Typography, Japanese and Japanese culture; Nicola loves to brew fine chinese and japanese teas.

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In 2015, I setted up and directed the "Learn to code project", a governmental project of the Presidency of the Sardinia Regional Government. The "Learn to code project" is the first governmental program in Italy to teach computer programming to young people in order to create new opportunities for them. This experimental project is in partnership with Codecademy, the premier online platform for free coding lessons with more than 24 million users. The project is now bringing to all sardinian students the skills required for 21st century jobs and it is the result of a strong desire to promote an actualization in both the contents and the forms of learning.

In addition to bringing Codecademy to schools, the "Learn to code project" introduced also Hackerdomo, the first hackathon of the Sardinia Regional Government. The goal was to develop in governments the concept of rapid software prototyping using the latest cutting-edge web and mobile technologies including NodeJS, MongoDB.

A beautiful article pulished on the 'Corriere della Sera' telling the whole story.

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We are a problem oriented society, we need to define everything as a problem that needs to be solved.Moreover we love continuity and we appreciate the same old ways of doing things.Unless something is not seen as a problem, we do not focus our thinking attention upon it. Moreover if something has stood the test of time, we all think it must be good.

Regarding Opera, there is still a lot that needs to be done. Few people has bothered to sit down to think about possible improvement areas in the Opera format. It is an effort that should be done. There are hundreds of improvement areas in the Opera format. A simple area of improvement is the spectator’s point of view. Every spectator has one single point of view which is excellent but cannot be enough. This is an improvement direction that requires some creative thinking.

We need to shut our eyes to bring new visions, to start thinking in terms of new images, the ones we have dreamed of as children. We need to temporarily destroy our memory of Opera images, the ones coming from the magazines, the books and the web. To be on the Opera stage is a forbidden, voyeuristic, childish dream. Our eyes are still closed. It is time to do it.

There should be something unobtrusive to record points of view and a place to store them. Google Glasses to record new points of view, social networks to store them. A Google Glass app to simplify the process. Simple technology as a medium to realize our dream.

We do not need incremental innovation, we do not need expensive 6k video recordings to catch millions of people. We need to think different. This viral but zero cost event was an example of lightness. The lightness of a bird and not of a feather, as Paul Valéry loved to say. Opera needs to remove weight from its structures to attract a new audience it desperately needs, the one we were able to catch in July 2014.

Selected press includes The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, CBC, Huffington Post, Vanity Fair.

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Tantangram is a beautiful and exciting game that allows children to compose music without the traditional music notation. The game is inspired by the ancient Chinese puzzle called tangram. Tangram is a dissection puzzle consisting of seven flat shapes, called tans, which are put together to form shapes. Tantangram assigns a random musical fragment to each tan empowering children to compose music while forming shapes. Tantangram is tactile, engaging and intuitive. Tantangram is available on iOS or on Android

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