Fabrizio Luccio

Università di Pisa

Randomness and Compactness in Information

2003-2004: Fall

Fabrizio Luccio was born in 1938. He received the Dr.Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in 1962, and the Libera Docenza in electronic computers from the Italian university system in 1968. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pisa. After an industrial experience in the research laboratories of Olivetti, he began his academic career at the Politecnico di Milano. In 1966 he moved to M.I.T. as a staff member at Project MAC, then he became a professor at the University of Southern California, and then at New York University, pursuing research in theoretical and algorithmic aspects of circuit synthesis.
In 1971 he returned permanently to Italy, as Lecturer and later Professor of Informatics at the University of Pisa, where he also served as Department Chairman for six years, and as Coordinator of the newly established Ph.D. program in Informatics for another six years. There he also set up, and is still directing, a successful research group in algorithmica. He spent several sabbatical periods as a visiting professor at UCLA, the University of Illinois, the National University of Singapore, and Carleton University in Ottawa. He has been a visiting scientist at T.J. Watson Research Center of IBM, USA, and a distinguished foreign scholar at the NTT LSI Laboratories in Morinosato, Japan. He has also been a distinguished scientist in the city of Ottawa, sponsored by a Canadian fund to carry on cooperative research with the local universities. He has pursued intense activities with UNESCO, for the dissemination of informatics in developing countries. For these activities he received in 1998 the title of Honorary Professor from the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco, Peru, the third oldest university on the American continent. He received a high degree of recognition for outstanding research, and was nominated a Fellow of the IEEE in 1983.
In addition to his studies in computer science, Professor Luccio is particularly interested in the relations among different fields of science and general culture, in the search of common concepts and paradigms. He has recently published a book on algorithmic aspects arising in the most diverse fields of knowledge, and plans to further pursue these studies, with particular attention to the role of random processes.