Degree in Mathematics and Diploma of Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, in 1968. From
1970 till 1981 researcher at IEI (now ISTI) of CNR, Pisa. In the seventies she worked at
the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Stanford University, directed by J. McCarthy.
Full Professor since 1981. From 1982 she is at DIS, now DIAG, Sapienza University of
Roma. From 1991 she is professor of Artificial Intelligence. She has been chair of the
Doctoral Program in “Ingegneria informatica”, and chair of the curriculum in “Ingegneria
informatica”. From 2006 to 2010 she was the Director of DIS, from 2010 to 2013 she
was the Dean of the newly founded School of “Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Informatica
e Statistica”.
Founder in 1988, and first President of AI*IA, the Italian Association for Artificial
Intelligence, at present its honoray member. Program chair for ECAI’90 and KRR’96,
Trustee of IJCAI from 1995 to 2005, Conference chair of IJCAI’99, President of FoLLI in
2004-2005; in 2002-2003 she has been Director of ITC-irst in Trento.
She has coordinated several national programs, projects, working groups, and networks of
excellence of the European Union. Expert in national and international evaluation and
review committees (in the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Germany, reviewer for ESF and
member of an evaluation panel for the starting grants of ERC), and of many national and
international editorial boards, she has authored about 150 international publications.
At DIAG she founded a research group in Artificial Intelligence, she has done research in
knowledge representation and automated reasoning. She applied AI techniques for the
construction of intelligent systems and systems that support human learning; she has done
research in cognitive robotics and the application of planning techniques to security.
Retired since 2015.
Awards:
Fellow of AAAI (1995) and of ECCAI, now EurAI (1999).
Donald Walker Award of IJCAI (2009).
Doctorate Honoris Causa (2002) of the School of Technology of the Linköping University –
Sweden.
ECCAI, now EurAI Distinguished Service Award (2014).
Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (2015).