I was born in 1966, in Avola, a small town near Siracusa (in Sicily), which is basically famous for its almonds and wine (Nero d'Avola), but it has some other beauties, like a wonderful sea.

P602

 

My basic interests have always been music and electronics/technology. Indeed, at the age of 13, I started "playing" both with electronics and guitar, and, in 1979, I wrote my first computer program! To do this, I used a Olivetti P603 programmable machine (see right photo), which was one of the pioneeristic "personal computers" of the '70; it is unbelievable the things that you could do with few hundreds of BYTES of memory (I'm really surprised when I see developers that "waste" gigabytes of memory with useless program instructions and then say "Oh no!.... the memory is over!!")

 

Z80_NE

 

My second computer I played with was a Z80-based board which could be brough, as a kit, from "Nuova Elettronica", an electronics magazine. With such a computer I learned assembly and BASIC, and my favourite task was to patch the original BASIC language (which was indeed quite limited) in order to add more statements. Really fun, indeed!

 

 

 

Z80_NE

 

 

But the real revolution came when I brought an Apple IIe. With that computer, the fantasy could not have limits!!!!

 

 

In 1988, I gave up joking and began to work seriously :-) I started a company in Catania with two friends: the Colby Video was a company that designed, produced, and sold teletext transmission systems (the teletext is called "Televideo", in Italy) for TV broadcasters. In a few time, we become the leaders, in Italy, in the field of teletext systems.

In 1994, I left Colby Video and began to study again. I took my "Laurea" degree in Computer Engineering in 1997, at the University of Catania. There, my academic carreer started!
I took the PhD in Electronic, Telecommunication and Computer Engineering in 2000, from University of Palermo, and then I got a temporary position of "assistant researcher" at the Engineering Faculty of the University of Catania.
In 2008, I got the permanent position of "researcher" at the Science Faculty of the University of Catania. Currently, I teach Computer Programming in the Physics degree of my Faculty.

Obviously, while working as resercher, I made some research and published some papers. My research interests were (and are) in the field of autonomous intelligent agents, complex and emerging systems, robotics, embedded computing programming, Grid systems.