Computer Science degree (Laurea in Scienze
dell'Informazione, 110/110),
University of Udine, 1984.
PhD in Computer Science, School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK; 2017.
At the University of Udine, Computer Science School I am
formally enrolled as associate professor; since 1986 I taught:
- Object Oriented Programming, 2016-2017;
- Web Design and User Experience, 2010-2014;
- User Centered Web Design, 2004-2017;
- Web Quality and Certification, 2007-2008;
- Operating Systems, 1997-2008;
- Information Retrieval and Web Design, 1999-2003;
- Computer Architectures, 1995;
- Database and Information Retrieval, 1990-1994;
- Advanced Programming Techniques, 1987-1990;
- Pascal Programming, 1985-1987;
Lecturer or invited speaker:
- Visiting professor at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, for a
30-hours course on user centered design and accessibility: Nov-Dec 2012.
- Visiting professor for the Master for the Management of
Digital Contents at the Facultat de Biblioteconomia i
Documentació of the University of Barcelona, Spain; March
2011; Prof. Mireia Ribera.
- Visiting scholar at the Laboratorio de
Interacción Persona-Computador para Necesidades Especiales of the
Universidad del Pais Vasco, San Sebastian, Spain; March 2011;
Prof. Julio Abascal.
- Visiting scholar at the Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas
Informáticos of the Universidad de Alicante, Spain; April
2010; Prof. Cristina Cachero.
- Visiting scholar at the Dep. de
Sistemas Informáticos y Computatión of the
Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain; June 2009; Proff. Silvia
Abrahao and Emilio Insfran.
- Instructor at the WWW09 tutorial Accessibility for the
Modern Web: Design and Evaluation of Accessible Websites, April
2009, Madrid.
- Keynote speaker at 2nd
International Workshop on Web Usability and Accessibility,
Auckland, NZ, Sept. 2008.
- Instructor at the Master in Open Distance Learning at
the University of Udine (June 2003, May 2004, June 2006, June
2007, June 2008).
- Visiting professor at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria) for
the course on Web Based Interactive Systems: user centered development
of web applications (Prof. Martin Hitz, Oct-Dec 2006).
- Invited speaker at the Workshop on Web Accessibility and
Metamodelling held in Grimstad, Norway (Prof. M. Snaprud, June
2006).
- Invited speaker at the 2nd International Congress on Inflammatory
Bowel Diseases in the 2000's: the state of the art (Udine, Italy,
Prof. Dario Sorrentino, April 2006).
- Visiting professor at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria) for
the course on Web Accessibility (Prof. Martin Hitz, March-May
2006).
- Instructor at the "Rete Regionale di Alta
Formazione per la Ricerca e l'Innovazione" (Trieste and Udine,
Italy, Sept. 2005).
- Invited panelist at "Website wrestling", SXSW
Interactive 2006, Austin TX (Glenda Sims, UT Austin, March 2006).
- Invited speaker at the Workshop
on Web Accessibility and Metamodelling held in Grimstad,
Norway (Prof. M. Snaprud, April 2005).
- Invited panelist at "Who says your site's accessible?", SXSW
Interactive 2004, Austin TX (Sharron Rush, Knowbility, March
2004).
- Instructor at Air University - Austin, Austin TX (Sharron
Rush, Knowbility, May 2003) on a course on using automatic web testing
tools.
- Invited panelist at "Can Stevie Wonder read your site?", SXSW
Interactive 2003, Austin TX (Sharron Rush, Knowbility, March
2003).
- Invited speaker at ADI'99 (Agenten,
Datenbanken und Information Retrieval), a German conference on
Distributed agents, databases and information retrieval,
Rostock-Warnemünde, Germany, October 1999.
- Invited speaker at Final
MIRA Conference, Glasgow UK (Prof. K. van Rijsbergen, April
1999).
- Instructor at Tampere Summer School on Information
Retrieval, Tampere, Finland (Prof. K. Jarvelin, August 1997).
- Instructor at Summer School on Information Retrieval, 1st
edition, organized by M. Agosti, B. Croft, N. Belkin, K. Van
Rijsbergen, Padova, Italy, July 1987.
- Instructor at European Summer School in Information
Retrieval, 1st edition, organized by M. Agosti, B. Croft, N. Belkin,
K. Van Rijsbergen, Bressanone, Italy, July 1990.
I spent two years with the Qualitative Reasoning Group
at the Dept. of Computer
Sciences of the University of Texas at Austin, led by prof. Benjamin Kuipers,
March-Sept. 1992, and again July 1995-Sept. 1996.
I am member of the program committee and/or reviewer or
collaborator with the following conferences/journals/groups:
- Member of the steering committee for Web for All.
- Organizer of the WWW2014/W4A joint panel 2020: game over for accessibility?
- W4A: Int. Cross-Disciplinary
Conference on Web Accessibility 2008 - 2012; Student Award Judge for W4A 2012, general chair for Web for All 2013; Student Award judge for W4A 2015; program committee member 2017
- Mobile web information systems 2012;
- The 30th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing 2015;
- Member of the Editorial Board of the ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing journal;
- ACM ASSETS 2008
(Co-chair of Doctorial Consortium), PC member ASSETS 2009, ASSETS 2010, ASSETS 2011, ASSETS 2012 (Associate Chair), ASSETS 2013, (Co-chair of Doctoral Consortium), PC member ASSETS 2014,
Co-chair of Doctoral Consortium for ASSETS 2015, 2016,2017
- CHI 2008, CHI 2009, CHI 2011, CHI 2012, CHI 2013, CHI 2014;
- Engineering
Interactive Computing Systems 2012;
- Member of the W3C Research and Development Working Group 2012-Sept. 2014;
- International Conference on Web Engineering ICWE 2014; International Conference on Web Engineering ICWE 2015
- Co-chair and editor of the W3C Website Accessibility Metrics webinar, Dec. 5, 2011;
- Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference, 1989-1993,
1995-1996, 2000, 2002, 2004 - 2011;
- INTERACT 2005, 2009, 2011, 2013;
- INTERACT 2011 Workshop on Mobile Accessibility;
- QWE 2010: 1st
International Workshop on Quality in Web Engineering, PC member; QWE2011; QWE 2012; QWE 2013
- MOBACC 2011-1012; MOBACC 2013 3nd Workshop on Mobile Accessibility, PC member;
- 2nd
Int. Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval 2009,
Cambridge, UK; 3rd
Int. Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval 2011,
Bertinoro, Italy
- 3rd International Workshop on Web Usability and Accessibility, IWWUA 2009, Poznan, Poland, Oct. 2009
- Brazilian
Symposium on Multimedia and the Web, WebMedia, Fortaleza, Brazil,
Oct 2009
- 30th European Conf. on Information Retrieval 2008, 2009
- Int. Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval 2007, 2009
- W3C Working Group on Authoring
Tools Accessibility Guidelines (until 2003)
- W3C Working Group on Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines (until 2003)
- Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial
Intelligence, 1989, 1991, 1993;
- International Workshop on User Modeling, Boston, 1994;
- 6th International Conference
on User Modeling, 1997;
- IJCAI-97;
- Final MIRA
Conference;
- New
Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia;
- Information Processing and Management;
- IEEE Transactions on System, Man and Cybernetics;
- IEEE Expert;
- IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence;
- IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics;
- IBM Systems Journal;
- ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction;
- ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing;
- ACM Transactions on the Web;
- Advances in HCI Journal;
- Computer Reviews;
- Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology;
- Communications for the ACM.
In June 2012 I co-founded Interaction Design
Solutions, a university spin-off company that develops
software for rapid prototyping and multiplatform deployment of user
interfaces based on innovative model-based development practices. We
also provide consultancy services regarding usability and
usage-centered design. Currently I hold the President position.
I'm currently co-operating with a number of companies in projects
dealing with usability and accessibility assessments.
From January 2000 to April 2004 I was scientific advisor for UsableNet Inc., one of the
leading companies producing web testing tools. I supervised the
development of key products including: LIFT for Dreamweaver, LIFT for
Dreamweaver - Nielsen Norman Group edition, LIFT Machine, LIFT Online,
LIFT Text Transcoder, OEM technology included in Dreamweaver. I
collaborated with Macromedia and with the Nielsen Norman Group.
See the list of papers and current research projects.
Since 1999 I'm focussing on usability and accessibility
principles for information design, expecially on websites. I'm
working on automatic tools for supporting accessibility and
usability testing, and on web quality assurance processes and
methodologies.
Current interests include alternative methods for assessing web
accessibility; semi-automatic methods for measuring it; web
credibility, emotions evoked by web pages, their mutual influences and
on usability; interaction design and model-driven approaches to user
interface design, testing and analysis.
Related papers:
a comparison method for
effectiveness of testing tools [40]; a paper describing quality
assurance processes [42]; two
papers on quality models [39, 38]; a
paper on how to validate a quality model [35].
A description of why accessibility policies are necessary [46], and a proposal for an effective method for testing accessibility [45].
A survey on web usability
testing tools [34].
An evaluation
of pros and con's of text-only pages produced on the fly [41] and descriptions of usability
studies of text-only pages with respect to disabled users [43, 44] and to PDAs users [47].
With other colleagues, I defined principles and mechanisms
underlying the design of an intelligent interface to online
databases (IR-NLI, Information Retrieval - Natural
Language Interface) [1, 2, 3, 4, 6]. On the basis of this experience a
new system was eventually developed (FIRE, Flexible
Information Retrieval Environment ) [13, 21] which included also a
user modeling component [5, 7, 8, 11]. FIRE was formally evaluated [25] and revised, leading to
the development of a strategic help component [37].
During the analysis of IR-NLI and FIRE, an original and effective
organization of the user-modeling component is proposed and
implemented as a user-modeling tool (UMT) which is applied in an
advisory system [11, 14, 16, 17].
Since 1999 I applied information retrieval techniques to
the problems of handling a software catalogue to
support activities like package understanding, reuse-driven design,
design-driven reuse and maintenance. A prototype has been built [31] and experimentally
evaluated [33, 36].
I developed a general framework for
usability evaluation of systems providing access
to information resources, encompassing browsing and retrieval
search models [32].
I contributed in conceptualizing and implementing a framework
for representing and reasoning about physical systems using
different kinds of knowledge (including teleological, functional,
behavioral and structural knowledge) called
multi-modeling. The underlying representational
framework supporting an effective integration of these kinds of
knowledge is based on a formalism derived from bond-graphs [9, 10, 12, 15].
Later, I concentrated on the automatic construction of
qualitative models and particularly on the integration of
the compositional modeling paradigm with semi-quantitative
simulation (SQPC, Semi-Quantitative Physics Compiler) [18, 19] and applied it to modeling
lake/dam systems and to socio-economic phenomena [22].
Subsequently SQPC has been extended with a sound method to handle
discontinuities in exogenous variables [20], which has been later
generalized into a mechanism, based on temporal logic, for
specifying trajectory constraints (implemented in
TeQSIM,
Temporally constrained QSIM) [23, 24, 26, 29, 27]. Methods for analysing
hybrid continuous-discrete dynamical systems have
been proposed in [30]; and
the use of Monte Carlo simulation to get a
statistical assessment of the validity of a qualitative prediction
have been tested and reported in [28].