After many years as a manager in Telecom Italia I have recently returned to the scientific and academic world. Since 1999 I have been teaching Artificial Intelligence at the Psychology Department of the University of Naples as well as participating in the Research Group on Artificial Life at the Istituto di Psicologia, CNR, Rome, Italy. At the same time I have been providing consulting services to private companies on themes connected with my teaching and research and founded XiWrite, an on-line company providing professional, English language editing services for the academic and scientific worlds..
I gained my initial experience in computer modeling at the School of European Studies, University of Sussex, (1970-1975) and at the Istituto Affari Internazionali, Rome where I worked as a researcher in international economics (1976-1980). From 1980 to 1982 I lectured in International Economics at the Scuola di Perfezionamento in Relazioni Internazionali, at the Political Science Faculty of the University of Florence. In 1983 I joined Sperry Corp. (today Unisys) as a Systems Engineer. In this latter position I developed a strong interest in new approaches to Artificial Intelligence and in particular in Artificial Neural Networks.
In 1989 I moved from Sperry to SIP (today Telecom Italia) where I became Project Leader for EPOS : a project to develop new ways of delivering on-line education. From 1992 to 1994 I was General Manager of the Consortium of International Telecoms operators designed to exploit the results of this work. Finally from 1995 to 2000 I worked as Operations Manager, in Trainet, a company in the Telecom Italia group, where I was strongly involved in research and development.
During my work in industry I kept in touch with developments in non-classical Artificial Intelligence and developed a new interest in biological evolution and its counterparts in other classes of Complex Adaptive System (CAS). I published papers in a number of journals, presenting my work in lectures and at international conferences.. In 1998 I began to work with O. Miglino of CNR on a research program designed to reproduce classical experiments in Animal Psychology using Evolutionary Robotics. In 1999 I taught a a Virtual (on-line) Seminar" on Artificial Life at the University of Hagen, Germany. In the same year I joined the University of Naples.