About

Research Interests After working for years in knowledge representation, with a focus on automated reasoning and constraint satisfaction, my research interests have gradually shifted towards interaction design and user experience methods for smart learning contexts, e.g., smart schools, or products, e.g., smart games.

An interdisciplinary team has become essential for my work, usually involving small heterogeneous groups for designing and assessing solutions together with the intended users of the interactive products, following a participatory design approach.

The most recent work of the Bolzano team focusses on the gamification of learning contexts, with special care on children's emotional engagement in the design process, besides on the evolution of their produtcs during the design process. See the realated journal publications.

Empirical studies for assessing design solutions play a key role in my work. In recent work with schools, for instance, both qualitative and quantitative data gathering methods were used for assessing the quality experience of children and their educators.

Research kewyords Knowledge representation and reasoning; computational logic; constraint-based reasoning; user experience design; user experience evaluation; human computer interaction; technology enhanced learning; personalised smart inclusion; game design; gamification.

Academic Resume

[1988/89—1993/94] Laurea in Mathematics (Master of Science), Pavia University. Thesis under the supervision of M. Ferrari and L. Magnani.

[1994—1996] Collaborations with the Philos Lab at Pavia University. Lab Head: L. Magnani.

[1995—1996] One-year specialisation course, with final examination, in Didattica della Matematica (Didactics of Mathematics), Department of Mathematics, Pavia University, Italy.

[Sept. 1997—Sept. 1998] Master of Logic, ILLC, Amsterdam Univerity. Thesis under the supervision of K.R. Apt. Thesis title: Temporal Constraint Programming: A Survey.

[Sept. 1998—Dec. 2002] Ph.D.: Computer Science, U. of Amsterdam. Thesis under the supervision of K.R. Apt and M. de Rijke, as member of LIT (Language and Inference Technology), now ILPS (Information and Language Processing Systems), at the ILLC U. of Amsterdam and the PNA1 (Networks and Logic - Optimization and Programming) cluster at CWI. Thesis title: Mapping Inferences: Diamond Satisfaction and Constraint Propagation.

[Dec. 2002—March 2003] Post-doc: ERCIM fellowship at CWI, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Project coordinator: K.R. Apt, to work on Constraints.

[March 27 2003—November 6 2005] Post-doc: a 3-year fellowship at SRA, ITC-irst, supported by the Autonomous Province of Trento (PAT), Italy, for the Automated Reasoning and Constraint Satisfaction project.

[November 7 2005—November 6 2013] Researcher at KRDB, Computer Science Faculty, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.

[July 1 2014—present] Researcher at IDSE, Computer Science Faculty, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.