Curriculum Vitae Dr. Marcello Leida Personal Details Surname: Leida Name: Marcello Place of Birth: Romano di Lombardia (BG) Italy Date of Birth: 29th July 1977 Address: Calle Bautismo, n. 5 7, 1A cp 47005, Valladolid, Castilla y Leon, Spain. Office: (+34)983081409; (+971)24018144 Mobile: (+34)605866535; (+971)566936698 E mail: marcello.leida@gmail.com (preferable for initial contact) E mail: marcello.leida@kustar.ac.ae HomePage: http://marcelloleida.weebly.com LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/leida Education 23rd April 2009: Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Milan. 17th February 2004: Master degree in Computer Science achieved at University of Milan (Department of Information Technologies Crema (CR Italy)) defending a thesis concerning Semantics analysis techniques for an XML based dialog system". July 1996: Diploma of computer science achieved at I.T.I.S.(Public Industrial Technical Institute) P. Paleocapa" in Bergamo Italy. Languages English: fluent Spanish: medium Italian: mother tongue Competences and Skills Computer science and software engineering Experience in a number of ITC domains, including design and implementation of complex
systems and platforms, in particular based on the following: Operating systems: Windows XP, 2000, NT, 98, 95, 3.1, Ms Dos, Unix Linux Programming Languages: Java, C, C++, C#, Delphi, Prolog. Scripting Languages: Bash Scripting, PHP, ASP, JavaScript, Python and Ruby. Query Languages: SQL, PL SQL, SPARQL. Software Suites and Frameworks: NetBeans, Eclipse. Web Servers: Tomcat, Web Logic. Database Engines: ORACLE 11g, Postgres, MySQL. Cloud computing, Grid and Map/ReduceFrameworks: ORACLE Coherence, Hazelcast, Hadoop. Triple Stores and Graph Databases: OpenLink Virtuoso, bigdata, Sesame, LarKC, AllegroGraph, Neo4J, OrientDB, Jena Federated ARQ query engine, Thinkerpop Blueprints. Inference Engines: Reasoners (Pellet, Racer, FaCT, Pronto, FuzzyDL), Rules Engines (Jess rule Engine,Drools). Data Mining: RapidMiner, Weka. Business Intelligence Reporting: Oracle BI, Pentaho. Process Mining: ProM. Enterprise level solutions: Continuous Integration (CruiseControl, Hudson), Maven Repository management (Nexus), SVN server set up and maintenance, RedHat EL 5 and 6 Linux server administration. Strong management, leadership and organizational skills. Competences in Scientific Research Main research interests in the field of: Semantic Web and Linked Data Automatic data visualization techniques. Access control for Triple Stores. Distributed graph databases. Distributed Conjunctive Query algorithms and rule engines. Distributed Continuous Queries. Systems for automatic and semi automatic Data Integration. Applications of Ontologies and Reasoning tasks. Data Mining, Text Mining, Information Retrieval. Emergent Semantics. Uncertain Information Representation and Reasoning. Secretary of IFIP W.G. 2.6 on Databases.
Observer for IFIP W.G. 12 on Web Semantics. Author of several patent applications, international conference and workshops papers and journal publication (see Appendix A). Program Committee and Reviewer for several international conferences and journals (see Appendix B). Academic and Industrial Supervisor for several Ms.C. and bachelor thesis (see Appendix B) Invited Talk and seminars in several international symposiums, workshops and universities (see Appendix B). Definition of applications for international and national research funds. Establishing network of collaborations for research funds. Establishing fellowship research programs and visiting professors. Work Experiences March 2010 Now: Senior Researcher at EBTIC Etisalat BT Innovation Centre Abu Dhabi U.A.E. Research activities on business process mining, automatic text classification, grid enabled triple stores, predictive enterprises, and Triple stores Access control policies. Generated several publications and patents definitions on the related topics. Successfully applied for international and national research funds (ICTFund, European projects). Successfully established network of collaborations with Academic and industrial partners, successfully established fellowship research programs and visiting professors. Team leader and project manager for the Enterprise and Distributed Applications area. Leading the research project on Real time Business Process Analysis: a cloud enabled, grid based triple store applied to real time business process analysis. Responsible for the down streaming and physical deployment and maintenance in enterprise servers of the research projects developed by the team to production environments (Service Delivery management in particular) and integration of our system with Business Intelligence solutions (Oracle BI). Responsible of definition and coordination of users training of the system in the enterprise. Responsible for customer relationships, technical consultancy and deployment of the research projects. Consultancy activity for Enterprises. From April 2012 allowed to work 50% of time from Spain, in order to follow closely the collaborations established and identify additional opportunities. Development of new ideas and new features of our platform, mainly in Java. August 2009 March 2010: Researcher at EBTIC Etisalat BT Innovation Centre Abu Dhabi U.A.E.
Research activities on business process mining, automatic text classification, grid enabled triple stores, and intelligent Campus project. Wrote several papers and patents on the related topics. Definition of flexible graph based data model for business process representation. Collaborated in the definition of the Intelligent Campus project and its underlying vision. Responsible for research project on automatic classification of tickets by application of Tex Mining techniques on real enterprise data (automatic classification of short and extremely noisy text messages). Responsible for the Development and relations with customer for a self diagnostic tool for WiMAX devices. Development of research proof of concept prototypes and complete solutions (installer, documentation, testing,...). Development of web applications. December 2008 August 2009: Post Doc at BT Innovate (British Telecom) Intelligent Systems Research Centre Ipswich UK. Research activities on uncertain information management, data integration, ontology alignment, schema matching and query resolution, data mining, ontology enrichment, record linkage and entity resolution. Wrote several papers and patents on the related topics. Research activities on managing uncertainty and semi automatic mapping generation. Theory of Data Integration System, Artificial Intelligence application, Learning Networks. Use of record linkage and entity resolution techniques to support automatic mapping generation. Definition of algorithms for ontology enrichment by adding annotations and additional concepts and relations extracted using data mining techniques. Integration of the automatic and semi automatic techniques defined in my Ph.D. thesis into an existing platform for data integration developed in BT(British Telecom) Intelligent Systems Research. Development of a Java prototype for uncertainty management based on the ideas presented in my Ph.D thesis. Technologies: Description Logics, Mathematical Models for managing uncertain information, Bayesian Networks, Neural Networks, Probabilistic Description Logic, Horn Rules, meta models for classifying uncertain information, query languages for the semantic web, meta queries, automatic schema mapping, automatic entity resolution and record linkage, use of data mining techniques to extract information for semi automatic ontology enrichment. January 2007 November 2008: Ph.D. Student at University of Milan Department of Information Technologies Crema (CR) Italy
Research activities on uncertain information management, data integration, ontology alignment, schema matching and query resolution. Wrote several papers and patents on the related topics. Research activities on managing uncertainty and semi automatic mapping generation. Theory of Data Integration System, Artificial Intelligence application, Learning Networks. Development of a Java prototype making use of Pellet, Pronto, FuzzyDL and DR Prolog reasoners for generating matching relations between meta data elements. The relations are then organized in a highly structured mathematical model (Formal Concept Lattice) which is used to generate the final mapping. Design and development of a Java based data integration system for querying heterogeneous data sources through a common meta model for representing the meta queries used to generate the local queries to the data sources in the specific query language. Technologies: Description Logics, Mathematical Models for managing uncertain information, Bayesian Networks, Neural Networks, Probabilistic Description Logic, Horn Rules, meta models for classifying uncertain information, query languages for the semantic web, meta queries. June 2006 February 2007: Ph.D. Student at University of Milan Department of Information Technologies Crema (CR) Italy Located at the BT Innovate (British Telecom) Intelligent Systems Research Centre Ipswich UK Research activities on heterogeneous, multi source data integration and ontology enrichment from different sources based on Association Rules. Wrote several papers on the related topics. Research activities in data integration systems, focusing on multi data sources of heterogeneous nature (structured, semi structured and unstructured). Research activities on data mining, semi structured data sources, fuzzy bags, similarity metrics between XML documents (semantic and structural similarity), text mining, sense disambiguation with support of external ontologies or thesauri, information retrieval techniques, lattice theories, Latent Semantic Analysis. Design of ODDI (Ontology mediated Data Integration), a distributed data integration system providing access to information through a conceptual model (wrappers, mapping representation, mapping generator, query engine, data analysis,...) Reasoning processes are aimed to check consistency, automatic classification and realization. Modelling semantics using semantic web ontology languages (OWL). Research activities in ontology enrichment from analysis of different data sources (i.e. Mapping Association Rules in the conceptual model). Design and development of a prototype for a query engine based on a common meta model for representing the queries and transformation to generate the local queries in the specific query language. Technologies: SBVR, Description Logics, Protege, Pellet, Hoover, Horn Rules, SWRL,
OWL DL, Data Mining, Association Rules. March 2005 June 2006: University of Milan Located at the BTExact (British Telecom) Intelligent Systems Research Centre Ipswich UK Research activities on documents wrapping technologies. Implementation of several techniques (such as: Latent Semantic Indexing, Text Summarization, Text Segmentation, Binary Factor Analysis... ) used to extract structural and semantic content from PDF, html, xml and plain text document. These techniques have been implemented in a project planned as a generic information classifier and ontology generator (OntoExtractor). Design and develop of a module used to extract information from a document and convert them in a XML document. The document is processed with the OntoExtractor tool to cluster the documents by their structure. Then the documents in the structure clusters can be clustered by their semantic content, using Ontology (OpenCyc) driven semantic tagging of the text. And the tool produces ontologies and assertions regarding the documents. There is also a trust based system to increase or decrease the value of an assertion which might be wrong by the navigation of the ontology. For more information refer to: Chapter III: OntoExtractor: A Tool for Semi Automatic Generation and Maintenance of Taxonomies from Semi Structured Documents, in Semantic Knowledge Management: An Ontology Based Framework, Antonio Zilli, Ernesto Damiani, Paolo Ceravolo, Angelo Corallo, Gianluca Elia ed., Information Science Reference. Technologies: Java, Xml, Dom, Sax, JAXP, JAXB, OWL, Soft Computing, Fuzzy Logic, Word Sense Disambiguation, Matrix Decomposition and neural networks. January March 2005: BTExact(British Telecom) Intelligent Systems Research Centre Ipswich UK Design and develop of a software used to display and edit an Intelligent Personal Hierarchies of Information (iphi ). Design and development of a graphical interface used to display and edit a hierarchy of information in the iphi format. The software allows the user to add, remove and edit categories of this hierarchy, each category contains one or more Tag Map used to bind information from external sources to the hierarchy. Each category can also use a specific method in order to make queries and categorize the information from the data sources. Once the data source is processed the tool produce an XML le describing the hierarchy, this le can be parsed by a JAXB parser in order to rebuild and reuse the complete hierarchy. This hierarchy is used to intelligent management of information coming from semi structured data sources (XML). Technologies: Java, Swing, Xml, Dom, Sax, JAXP, JAXB, Soft Computing October 2004 January 2005: University of Milan Located at the BTExact (British
Telecom) Intelligent Systems Research Centre Ipswich UK Design and development of a software for wrapping and structuring information coming from heterogeneous data flows (PDF, HTML, databases,...) Research in Data Mining, Information Retrieval techniques, Matrix Processing, Latent Semantic Analysis Design and development of a document classifier and taxonomy generation software using Data Mining and Information Retrieval techniques: design and development of wrappers for semi structured and unstructured documents, research activities on data mining, semi structured data sources, fuzzy bags, measures of similarity between XML documents (semantic and structural similarity). Design and development of OntoExtractor Java application used to extract and organize an information flow from semi structured and structured data sources at content level. Fuzzy technologies and probabilistic technologies are used to determine the structure of the documents (PDF and HTML documents). Technologies: UML, Java, Xml, Dom, Sax, SWT, Swing, Soft Computing (Fuzzy, probabilistic, machine learning), wrappers for different formats. October November 2004: University of Milan in collaboration with BTExact (British Telecom) Intelligent Systems Research Centre Ipswich UK Development of software for managing semi structured data sources. Basic research on Fuzzy Sets, clustering algorithms. Development of a software for clustering a flow of semi structured documents by their structure, the development of the software required soft computing, information retrieval and data mining techniques. Presentation of a prototype of the system in BTExact Intelligent Systems Research Centre Ipswich UK during the Open Day of 30th November 2004. Technologies: Java, Xml, Dom, Sax, Soft Computing (Fuzzy, probabilistic, machine learning). September 2003 May 2004: University of Milan in collaboration with ST Microelectronics. Design and development of a software of information extraction from semi structured data flows. Basic research on dialog systems, thesauri, sound processing and voice identity verification. The project was developed in collaboration with ST Microelectronics (Italy) and the aims was to realize a voice driven ATM machine. The information coming from the user is in a semi structured format (XML). The software extracts the information with probabilistic and soft computing techniques and executes the actions modelled in a finite states automa.
All the information about the configuration and the environment of the system are in semi structured format (XML). The software is easily adaptable to many situations with level of interaction related to small bounded contexts. Technologies: Java, XML, DOM parser, Soft Computing (Fuzzy, probabilistic, machine learning) June 2004 October 2004: Web developer at Medusa S.r.l. Caravaggio(BG) ITALY Company of design and development of web applications. Main activities: Design and develop of several modules in PHP,.NET and ASP (news, mail, restricted area, reporting, on line catalogues, internal search engine) Design and development of a Intranet web site for CRM in PHP and MYSQL. Design of a CRM web application in J2EE. Technologies: J2EE, PHP, ASP,.NET, Apache, IIS, MySQL June 2004 October 2004: Consultant and developer at Cross Communication S.r.l. Caravaggio(BG) ITALY Company owner of T@rghet & T@rghet mobile software (Marketing Information Management). Main activities: Development of the T@rghet software using C#. Consulting activities to costumers at various level. Technologies: C#, Access, MS Office, Diagnostic tools, Anti Spam Tools, Protection Tools(Firewall, antivirus,...). May 2002 July 2002: Web developer at Pegaso S.r.l. Bergamo ITALY. Company of design and development of web sites. Main activities: Design and develop of a CMS based on PHP and MySQL on a Linux platform, using Apache Web Server Customization of PHPNuke and PostNuke CMS. Personalization and integration of several PHPNuke modules Technologies: PHP, Linux, Apache server, MySQL, PHPNuke, PostNuke. November 2001 February 2002: Software developer at Interactiva S.r.l. Montodine (CR) ITALY. Company of software design and development. Main activities: Development of a software used for monitoring seismic activities recorded in a SQLServer database. Technologies: Visual Basic, Microsoft SQLServer.
September 2000 January 2001: Web developer at Bizmatica S.r.l. Milano ITALY Company of web design and development, web hosting, housing. Main activities: Development of HTML, XML/XST static websites and development of ASP code for core engine of dynamic websites. Technologies: ASP, HTML, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Apache Server, Microsoft IIS. June 1996 September 1996: Students' consultant and software/hardware technician at Hewlett Packard Stezzano (BG) ITALY Company of technology and services engineering. Main activities: Stage sponsored by HP for installation of HP Vectra machines, with Windows NT 3.51, plotter, scanner and software at Carrara Academy of Arts in Bergamo. Technical and theoretical support to the students of the Academy. Technologies: Windows NT 3.51, PhotoShop, PaintShopPro, MS Office. Professional Activities: Design and development of static and dynamic websites, portals and web applications. (some examples: www.comitatosanrocco.org, www.leidapavimenti.com, www.montaggiprefabbricati.com) Experiences as consultant on Hardware and various Software installation, configuration and troubleshooting (Especially for SME). Consultant in various SME to assist migration to IT based information management systems. Other experiences: Project Administrator of OntoExtractor http://sourceforge.net/projects/ontextractor. Private lessons at various levels (i.e. Introduction to Information Technology, Windows, Java, Basic Electronic, Office Suite, Scripting Languages, Programming Theories). Boy Scouts Group Leader in the local group of my village (Fornovo San Giovanni I) from 1997 to 2004 Appendix A: Publications Ph.D. Thesis
Marcello Leida Toward Semantics Aware Ontology Mediated Data Integration", Universit a degli Studi di Milano, a.a 2007/2008. Master's Thesis Marcello Leida Tecniche di analisi semantica per la generazione di dialoghi vocali in formato XML", Universita degli Studi di Milano, a.a 2002/2003. Patents Patent Number WO2011110809. Gusmini Alex, Leida Marcello; DATA INTEGRATION SYSTEM http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/wo2011110809 Patent Number (pending) Marcello Leida, Ali Afzal, Basim Majeed, Paul Taylor: Distribuited SPARQL query answering. Patent Number (pending) Marcello Leida, Ali Afzal, Basim Majeed, Maurizio Colombo: Continuous SPARQL query answering. Patent Number (pending) Marcello Leida, Basim Majeed, Maurizio Colombo, Ernesto Damiani: Access Control methods for continuous SPARQL query answering. Books Marcello Leida Ontology based Semantic Data Integration". published by LAP Lambert Academic Publishing (May 4, 2010). ISBN 978 3838358819. Book Chapters Marcello Leida Chapter III: OntoExtractor: A Sample Ontology Learning System" in Book Semantic Knowledge Management: An Ontology Based Framework Edited By: Antonio Zilli, University of Lecce, Italy; Ernesto Damiani, University of Milan, Italy; Paolo Ceravolo, University of Milan, Italy; Angelo Corallo, University of Lecce, Italy ; Gianluca Elia, University of Lecce, Italy. published by IGI Publishing. Journals Marcello Leida, Alex Gusmini, John Davies Semantics aware data integration for heterogeneous data Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing. Marcello Leida, Zhan Cui, Paolo Ceravolo, Ernesto Damiani and Alex Gusmini. Semantics Aware Matching Strategy (SAMS) for Ontology mediated Data Integration (ODDI)" in, International Journal of Knowledge Engineering and Soft Data Paradigms Volume 2, Issue 1 (December 2010). Marcello Leida, Paul Taylor, Basim Majeed. Case Study in Process Mining in a Multinational Enterprise Lecturen Notes on Business Information Processing Springer (To Appear) April 2012.
International Conferences Marcello Leida, Maurizio Colombo, Andrej Chu, Basim Majeed: Extendible Data Model for Real time Business Process Analysis IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM) 2012, 10 13 December 2012, Hong Kong, China. Marcello Leida, Paul Taylor, Xiaofeng Du, Basim Majeed: "TOWARD AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF SPARQL RESULT SET VISUALIZATIONS A Use Case in Service Monitoring". in proceeding of ICE B International Conference on e Businesses July 18th to 21th, 2011 Seville Spain. Marcello Leida, Ali Afzal, Basim Majeed: "Outlines for dynamic visualization of Semantic Web data". in proceeding of OnTheMove Federated Conferences & Workshop (OTM 2010) 1st International Workshop on DATA Visualization and Integration in Enterprises and on the Web (Dataview) October 25th to 29th, 2010 Hersonissou Crete Greece. Paolo Ceravolo, Ernesto Damiani, Marcello Leida: "A toward framework for generic uncertainty management". in Proceedings of IFSA2009 / EUSFLAT09 June 2009, Lisbon. Paolo Ceravolo, Ernesto Damiani, Marcello Leida: "Ontology Robustness in Evolution". in OTM Workshops 2008 : 1010 1017. Paolo Ceravolo, Ernesto Damiani, Marcello Leida: "Which role for an Ontology of Uncertainty?". in Proceeding of Uncertain Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW) International Semantic Web Conference. Paolo Ceravolo, Zhan Cui, Ernesto Damiani, Alex Gusmini, Marcello Leida: "ODDI: Ontology Driven Data Integration".in KES (1) 2008 : 517 524 Paolo Ceravolo, Zhan Cui, Ernesto Damiani, Alex Gusmini and Marcello Leida "ODDI A Framework for Semi automatic Data Integration", in Proceeding of 10th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, June 2008, 2008. Awarded as Best Paper in Area: "Databases and Information Systems Integration". Paolo Ceravolo, Ernesto Damiani, Cristiano Fugazza and Marcello Leida "Modeling Semantics of Business Rules", In Proceeding of the Inaugural IEEE International Conference On Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE DEST), 2007. Paolo Ceravolo, Zhan Cui, Alex Gusmini and Marcello Leida "An FCA based mapping generator", in Proceeding of 12th IEEE Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, 2007.
Paolo Ceravolo, Ernesto Damiani, Alex Gusmini, and Marcello Leida "Using Ontologies to Map Concept Relations in a Data Integration System", in OTM Workshops (2). 2007. pp. 1285 1293, 2007. Paolo Ceravolo, Alex Gusmini and Marcello Leida "Matching operators in data integration",in Proceeding of Second International Conference in Knowledge Management in Organizations, 2007. Zhan Cui, Ernesto Damiani and Marcello Leida "Benefits of Ontologies in Real Time Data Access", in Proceeding of Digital EcoSystems and Technologies Conference, 2007. DEST '07. Inaugural IEEE IES, vol., no., pp.392 397, 21 23 Feb. 2007, 2007. Paolo Ceravolo, Ernesto Damiani, Marcello Leida and Marco Viviani OntoExtractor: A Fuzzy Based Approach to Content and Structure Based Metadata Extraction", in OTM Workshops (2), pages 1825 1834, Springer, 2006. Zhan Cui, Ernesto Damiani, Marcello Leida and Marco Viviani, OntoExtractor: A Fuzzy Based Approach in Clustering Semi structured Data Sources and Metadata Generation". In proceeding of KES (1) 2005, pp.112 118, September 2005 Other Ernesto Damiani, Marcello Leida "Semantics aware, ontology mediated mapping generation system", in ebms, 10th Session on Managing Uncertainty and Competition Through Dynamic Learning Networks Ostuni, July 3rd to 5th, 2008. Marcello Leida Structural information extraction techniques from semi structured data flows, coming from different data sources" in Note del Polo Research, n. 70, February 2005. Appendix B: Activities in schools, conferences or other related activities Invited Talks: Seminar at University of Milan on: Two Generations of Business Process Analysis, June 2012. SIMPDA 2011 First International Symposium on Data Driven Process Discovery and Analysis Invited Industrial Talk on Case studies of Process Mining in a Multinational Enterprise. IFIP 2.6 Annual Meeting (Crete, 2010) Talk regarding experience of enterprise
wide business process analysis. IFIP 2.6 Research Workshop (Nicosia, 2009) Fostering Web Of Data Talk regarding Semantic enabled data integration. IFIP 2.6 Research Workshop 2008 Emergent Semantics in Social Context April 16th 18 th 2008, Ascona, Switzerland. Presented a discussion on Data Integration: the user factor. Seminar: Meta Data Format: the example of iphi as part of Prof. Ernesto Damiani's Master degree course of University of Milan Meta Data and Knowledge Management. Program Committee: Program Commitee ot the ESWC 2012. Program Commitee of the OTM Academy 2011. Program Commitee of the DataView 2011. Program Commitee of the SIMPDA 2011 First International Symposium on Data Driven Process Discovery and Analysis Program Committee and Session Chair of OnTheMove workshop OnToContent (OTM 2010). Program Committee and Session Chair of OnTheMove workshop DataView (OTM 2010). Reviews: Reviewer for Semantic Web Journal, LNBIP, Journal for Ambience Intelligence and Humanized Computing 2012 Reviewer for the SIMPDA 2011 First International Symposium on Data Driven Process Discovery and Analysis Reviewer for OnTheMove workshop OnToContent. Reviewer for World Wide Web Journal edition 2011. Reviewer for IEEE DEST 2010. Reviewer for IFSA EUSFLAT 2009 conference July 20 24 2009, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal. Referee for The Second International Conference on Open Source Systems June 8 10 2006, Grand Hotel, Como, Italy Thesis supervision: Co relator of Ms.C degree thesis of Hend Al Thair: A proactive multi agent system for travel recommendations" thesis discussed July 2011at Khalif University. Co relator of bachelor degree thesis of Matteo Peviani: from semantic web to social semantic web: techniques of information integration and retrieval" thesis discussed July 2008 at University of Milan. Co relator of bachelor degree thesis of Andrea Dale: Ontology mediated queries to heterogeneous data sources" thesis discussed April 2008 at University of Milan.
Co relator of master degree thesis of Alex Gusmini: Meta data integration: use of ontologies to support integration of relational data bases" thesis discussed October 2007 at University of Milan. Co relator of bachelor degree thesis of Enrico Zucchi: use of meta data in web Content Management systems" thesis discussed April 2008 at University of Milan. Co relator of bachelor degree thesis of Roberto Cattadori: from semantic web to social semantic web: techniques of information integration and retrieval" thesis discussed October 2007 at University of Milan. Co relator of master degree thesis of Andrea Gualdoni: Measures of efficiency for the experimentation of a knowledge extraction tool" thesis discussed July 2006 at University of Milan.