About me
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.
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!!")
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!
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.