PIETRO TORASSO

Curriculum Vitae

Pietro Torasso got the "Laurea'' degree (summa cum laude) in Scienze dell'Informazione (Computer Science) from the University of Torino in 1974. Since 1974 to 1990 he was with the Dipartimento di Informatica - University of Torino. In the academic year 1990/91 he was with the University of Udine as Professor of Computer Science. From November 1991 till October 1995 he was Professor of Computer Science at Campus of Alessandria. From November 1995 he is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Torino. He has been Chair of Dipartimento di Informatica from November 1995 to October 2001. Since December 2001, he is the Chair of the Ph.D. Program in Computer Science, University of Torino.

In mid seventies his research efforts were mainly devoted to speech analysis and understanding. In late seventies and early eighties his research activity has been carried out in the areas of Natural Language Understanding and Knowledge-Based Systems, with particular attention to the representation and reasoning with uncertain knowledge and to the development of diagnostic systems. From late eighties his work was mainly done in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning with original contributions to abductive, causal and temporal reasoning, theory of diagnosis, model-based reasoning, learning-by-experience, knowledge compilation and case-based reasoning. He contributed to the field of diagnostic systems with the development of hybrid system architectures able to integrate heuristic knowledge with model-based diagnosis and case-based reasoning. Since mid-nineties he is active in the area of intelligent agents for man-machine interaction (in particular Intelligent User Interfaces).

He is author of over 100 papers published in international journal, books and proceedings of congresses. He has been chair of national and international conferences (in particular KR'94 and AI*IA '93), President of Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence from 1995 to end of 1999, Member of the ECCAI Executive Board from 1996 to 1998.

He was the co-winner of HUSPI International Prize for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (1985) and of ECCAI prize (1990). In August 2000 he was nominated ECCAI Fellow for his pioneering work in the area of Artificial Intelligence.

He was (is) the principal investigator of many projects supported by MIUR (Italian Ministry of Education and Reserch), CNR (National Research Council of Italy) and ASI (Italian Space Agency). He was (is) the project leader of research contracts with industries and organizations; among them it is worth mentioning the "Cantiere Multimediale su Servizi Telematici Adattativi" sponsored by TELECOM Italia (1997-2000).

Currently he is the principal investigator of a project supported by Regione Piemonte in the area of Intelligent Supervision for aerospace applications.

He has and is been involved in projects supported by European Union (in the 6^th FQ: the HOPS project). He was Senior Scientist in the project "Learning in Humans and Machines" supported by European Science Foundation.