Present and Past Positions

• 2022-present: Professor of Computer Science, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, Italy
  
• 2003-2022: Professor of Pervasive Computing, Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
  
• 2000-2003: Senior Research Scientist, Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield
  
• 1993-2000: Senior Researcher, ITC-Irst (currently Fondazione Bruno Kessler), Trento, Italy
  
• 1988-1993: Researcher, Centro Ricerche Fiat, Torino, Italy
  

Present and Past Relevant Positions

• 2020-2022: Founder and Director of the University Technology Centre on Artificial Intelligence for Defence and Security, The University of Sheffield
• 2009-2012: Director of Research and Innovation, University of Sheffield (Digital World)

Startups

• 2020-: Co-founder, CEO and Director of Aeqora Ltd, a University of Sheffield Spin-off Company providing mobility services
• 2012-: Co-founder and Scientific Advisor to The Floow, a company providing telematics motor insurance solutions.
  The Floow had a $69 million exit in 2022.
• 2007-: Co-founder and Director of K-Now Technologies Ltd, a University of Sheffield Spin-off Company providing knowledge services

European Projects Directorships

I coordinated 4 EU projects practically without interruption between 2002 and 2019. Then Brexit came and I was no longer eligible to coordinate a project.

• 2016:2019: Director of SETA, a 13-partner Horizon 2020 European Project on large-scale ubiquitous data and service for metropolitan mobility (€5.5m)
• 2012-2016: Director of WeSenseIt, a 14-partner FP7 European Project on Citizen Observatories of Water (€5.3m)
• 2006-2010: Director of X-Media, a 15-partner European Project on Knowledge Management over Large Scale Across Media (€9.9m)
• 2002-2005: Director of Dot.Kom, a European Project on Information Extraction from Texts for Knowledge Management, (€3.5m)

About me

I grew up in North Western Italy, lived in several places until I moved to the UK and lived there for over 20 years. Now I have moved back to NW Italy.
I am an academic; most of my time is spent doing research. I work on large-scale pervasive computing, an area that sounds terribly boring until you discover that my job lets me fly drones and go to music festivals for free.
I also teach awfully bright students. I teach advanced Web Technologies, another topic that looks horribly boring until you discover it is about doing cool things with Spies, Football, and Music Records.
Some of my undergrads have won competitions and even presented their results to the Prime Minister. Some of them have become PhD students and now are academics or researchers themselves. Others after their PhDs have become CEOs/CTOs and Chief Officers of companies we have created together. That probably means that I am old, because only old people can boast about the great achievements that their children have in life.
My passion is to work with mobile architectures and wearables to track human mobility. I have developed apps that have been downloaded over a million times. My research page detail these. I also have a personal blog where I describe some of the things I do. It is rather limited because it is just related to personal rather than professional interests, but you can find it useful.
I do quite a bit of travelling for work. If I do not reply to your emails, it is hopefully because I am somewhere rather exotic.
Oh, and in case you were wondering: I am dyslexic. This is why there are mistakes on these pages. Dyslexia is sometimes a hindrance but helps me think differently. These occasional stumblings taught me to fly.