Curriculum Vitæ et Studiorum

I (he, him; ORCID ) am currently an Associate Professor at Università degli Studi di Milano (Department of Computer Science, formerly known as DICo) where I teach several courses. I also worked as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Italian Switzerland, and as a Lecturer at Politecnico di Milano. In 2023 I taught at Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland as a visiting professor.

My research interests are mainly in the field of software engineering, system security, and computer science education. I'm one of the two General Chairs of ITiCSE 2023. I organized the International Workshop on Software Engineering for Secure Systems (seven editions from SESS'05 to SESS'11), and I served in several Program Committees(PBit'03, ISSSE'06, ICSOFT 2006-21, AReS 2008-23, OWASP 2008-09 AppSec 2007-08,SREIS'08, OSSCoNF'08, ESSoS 2009-10, STPSA 2009-15, S-Cube 2009-10,2012, ISSRE 2010 Fast Abstracts Track, SSIRI 2011, Eclipse-IT 2011-12, CIIA'13, WID'13, SPRO'15, ICISSP 2015-20, SG-CRC 2016, SENSORNETS 2016-18, DSIR 2017-22, ITiCSE (Associate Program Chair) 2018-23, SIGCSE (Reviewer) 2019-23 (Associate Program Chair) 2023, ISSEP 2018-23 , Constructionism 2018 , APCSE 2020, ICon-MaSTEd 2020-2022). Since november 2020, I am a member of the scientific committee of Mondo Digitale, a magazine published by AICA. I'm also in the Editorial Board of the journal Educational Technology Quarterly.

I believe it is urgent to change the common misconception of informatics as the mere use of information technologies. Informatics is a science, not dexterity with computers or applications. Thus, I'm one of the founders of ALaDDIn, a group working to spread informatics as a science among the general public, I help in organizing a game-contest for schools called Bebras, and I am the coordinator for the informatics branch of the national Plan for fostering scientific degrees.

I pursued some of my research work by travelling abroad: I visited the Technischen Universität Berlin, collaborating with Gabriele Täntzer, the JAIST in Kanazawa (Japan), working with Ochimizu Koichiro, and the Computing Department of Lancaster University (UK), working with Lynne Blair.

I am a senior member of ACM. From 2005 until 2020, I was part of the steering committee of CLUSIT, an Italian association promoting awareness, continuous education, and information sharing about digital security; currently I'm a member of its scientific committee. I'm a member of the scientific committee of the Information Society Law Center of the Department of Legal Sciences "Cesare Beccaria", a multidisciplinary research center, devoted to the study of the legal, technological, political and social aspects of the Information Society. Moreover, to support the free software community, I joined the Debian Project, currently as an emeritus developer.

On January 2001 I completed the Ph.D. program in Computer and Automation Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, with the thesis “Towards Software Components for Non Functional Aspects”, Carlo Ghezzi was my advisor: this gives me a place into the Software Engineering Academic Genealogy and even into the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

I served in the Italian Army with the rank of second lieutenant (NATO OF-1) in the Cen.Te.Spe.Ri.Ma.T. unit, then based in Treviso: I joined up the Data Transmission team, testing routing protocols for tactical wide area networks.

On June 18th 1996 I got a Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering (with special education in Computer Science), thanks to the graduation thesis: “Omissys: Managing Temporal Information in Multi-model Diagnosis”. My work (joint with Sergio Novelli) was tutored by Andrea Bonarini and Piera Sassaroli within the Project of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics developed by the Dept. of Electronics and Information. In 1997 I obtained the qualification for working as a professional Engineer.

I attended the IX, X, XI and XII years of the Rudolf Steiner (Waldorf) School pedagogic cycle. The final work was a study on Euler's “Observations on the sums of divisors”.

I was born in Milan (Italy) in 1970.