NATIONAL PHD IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

email: lenzerini@diag.uniroma1.it
phone:

Maurizio Lenzerini
(http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~lenzerini)

General Information
• Born December 14, 1954, Pavia (Italy),
• Married with Tiziana Catarci since 1990, with one child
• Current Position: Full Professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy
• Education: Graduated from University of Rome La Sapienza in 1980 (Laurea in Ingegneria Elettronica)
• Academic Appointments (at the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy):

1983 - 1987: Assistant Professor
1987 - 1990: Associate Professor
1990 - present: Full Professor
1993 - 2000: Director of the Bachelor Program in Computer Engineering
2000 - 2008: Director of the PhD Program in Computer Science and Engineering
2006 - 2014: Director of the PhD School in Information and Communication Technologies
2014 - 2016: In the Executive Board of the School for Advanced Studies of Sapienza University
2016 - present: Vice-Chair of the School for Advanced Studies of Sapienza University

• Main Research Areas:
Data Management Theory, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Information Integration, Ontology Languages

Honors
• IBM Shared University Research Grant, 2005
• EurAI Fellow (https://www.eurai.org/awards_and_grants/fellows), 2008
• IBM Faculty Award, 2008
• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Recognition Service Award, 2008
• ACM Fellow, 2009
• Member of the Academia Europaea - The Academy of Europe, 2011
• ACM Recognition of Service Award, 2011
• AAAI Fellow (http://www.aaai.org/Awards/fellows-list.php), 2017
• ER Fellow, 2017
• P. Chen Award, 2022

Research accomplishments
Maurizio Lenzerini is considered one of the world leaders in two areas of Computer Science, namely, Data Management and Knowledge Representation.

Data Management. He is internationally renowned for his contributions to Information Integration, which is one discipline of Data Management dealing with the principles and the techniques for combining information residing at different sources. The problem studied by this discipline is highly relevant, from both the scientific and the industrial point of view, and is often cited as one of the biggest challenges that Information Technology currently faces. Maurizio Lenzerini provided fundamental results in this discipline.
He contributed to shaping the field of schema integration. In 1984 he defined the first methodology for database schema integration, and he co-authored, together with C. Batini and S. Navathe, the most cited paper on schema integration, and more generally the most cited work in information integration, in the whole literature. This paper is still considered a fundamental work today, not only in databases, but also in ontology matching and merging.
While schema integration focuses on integrating database structures, data integration additionally deals with the instance level. Maurizio Lenzerini made fundamental contributions in data integration. The paper based on his invited talk at the 2002 ACM Symposium on the Principles of Database Systems (PODS) is the reference in the theory of data integration. It is currently the most cited paper in this area, and is a key reference in many courses on this subject at the graduate level worldwide. He also made significant contributions to other aspects of Database Theory, such as view-based query processing, and the theory of regular path queries, for both structured and semi-structured data.
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. While visiting the University of Toronto in 1986, he had the opportunity of collaborating with John Mylopoulos, Ray Reiter, Hector Levesque, and Alberto Mendelson, in particular on the study of the trade-off between the expressive power of Knowledge Representation formalisms and the decidability/tractability of automated reasoning in such formalisms. Since then, he has been one of the world leaders of the research on Description Logics, and among the first initiators of such research in Europe. With his pioneering work on the trade-off between expressive power and complexity of reasoning, and his thrust towards expressive Description Logics suited for fully capturing conceptual modeling formalisms, he strongly contributed to the success of Description Logics as the basis of the OWL Web Ontology Language. He was among the first to investigate the complexity of reasoning in nonmonotonic logics, such as inheritance networks and propositional circumscription, the impact of finite model reasoning in Knowledge Representation, the dichotomy between knowledge and truth in knowledge bases, and the notion of data complexity in knowledge bases. With respect to the latter issue, he recently introduced a novel kind of Description Logics, namely the DL-Lite family, which is specifically tailored towards dealing with very large amount of data. Such study has directly influenced a specific profile in the OWL 2 W3C standard.

Besides contributing to each of the above areas separately, he also made fundamental contributions at the interface of these two areas. Most experts generally associate his name to the research combining Data Management and Knowledge Representation. In particular, his work in the early '90 initiated the area of semantic, or ontology-based, data integration, and has inspired many developments of the field. The basic underlying idea was to adopt Description Logics for expressing the global schema of a data integration system as an ontology, so that Description Logic-based automated reasoning could provide advanced services for information integration tasks.

He has also worked on other research areas of Computer Science. He has studied Service Modeling and Composition, introducing what in the community is now known as the “Roman model”, and contributing to one of the first solutions to automated service composition. Since its introduction, the Roman model has been studied by several research groups worldwide, and is one of the key references in the formal approaches to automated service composition.

Impact measures
He is the author of more than 350 publications in international journals and conference proceedings. Many of these papers are widely cited in the scientific literature. According to Harzing Publish or Perish (P&P) based on Google Scholar, December 2020, his i10-index is 190, and h-index is 82, which is the highest in Italy and one of the highest in Europe in the field of Computer Science.

Projects
He was responsible of several National and European projects, including the following EU-funded projects: Esprit Project 22469 DWQ - Data Warehouse Quality (1997-1999), FP5 IST-2001-34825 SEWASIE - SEmantic Webs and AgentS in Integrated Economies (2001-2004), FP5 IST-2001-33570 INFOMIX - Boosting Information Integration (2001-2004), FP6-7603 TONES - Thinking ONtologiES (2005-2008). He was the national coordinator of the Italian MIUR-funded FIRB 2005 project TOCAI.IT - Tecnologie Orientate alla Conoscenza per Aggregazioni di Imprese in Internet [Knowledge-based Technologies for Internet-based Enterprises] (2006-2009), that is a FIRB project with global funding of Euro 3.230.000, carried out by the Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per l'Informatica (CINI), the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), and 3 companies. He has also been involved in European projects on Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI, FP7-ICT-2009-5, € 450.000), and the IP project Optique (€ 800.000). ACSI is concerned with designing, deploying, maintaining, and joining into environments that support service collaborations, by means of a framework based on two notions: interoperation hubs and dynamic artifacts. The goal of OPTIQUE is to build a system for scalable end-user access to big data by exploiting semantic technologies. In recent years he has been responsible of several applied projects on Ontology-based Data Management, including one with Telecom Italia (€ 250.000), one with the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance (€ 300.000), one with Monte dei Paschi di Siena (€ 350.000), and one with ACI Informatica. In all of them, the goal is to build an ontology-based data access system that allows the users to query the data sources of an organization through an ontology.

Start-up
He is the president and co-founder of OBDA Systems S.r.l. (see http://www.obdasystems.com/), a start-up proposing state-of-the-art solutions based on the most recent innovations in the field of semantic technologies to provide its clients with a direct and effective means for extracting key data from large and complex datasets. The foundation of these solutions is representation and reasoning through ontology modelling.


Teaching
He has a wide teaching and academic experience. In the last three decades he has taught a huge number of courses at the Università di Roma La Sapienza, both at the under-graduate and the graduate level, on
- Software Engineering,
- Programming Languages,
- Formal Methods,
- Data Management,
- Knowledge Representation.

He has also taught PhD courses worldwide, and has organized several international PhD schools, including DASI '06 - PhD School on Data and Service Integration, DEIS '10 - Advanced School on Data Exchange, Integration, and Streams. He is the author of several academic books (both in English and in Italian) on Knowledge Representation, Databases, and Software Design.

Students
He has supervised a large number of exceptional PhD students, including Francesco M. Donini (1992), Marco Cadoli (1993), who sadly passed away in 2006, Andrea Schaerf (1994), Giuseppe De Giacomo (1995), Diego Calvanese (1996), Andrea Calì (2002), Domenico Lembo (2003), who are outstanding, internationally renowned researchers. Four of them obtained a full professorship position, one is associate professor, one is assistant professor, and one is post-doc at Oxford University. Some of them have become international leaders in their research areas: Marco Cadoli in non-monotonic reasoning, Andrea Schaerf in local search, Giuseppe De Giacomo in reasoning about actions, and Diego Calvanese in Description Logics. Some of his former students are still part of the research group he founded in 1987. Other more recent PhD students are Antonella Poggi (2008), Domenico Fabio Savo (2014), Marco Console (2016), Lorenzo Lepore (2017), Gianluca Cima (2020). The group that he is still currently leading is internationally renowned for its work in Knowledge Representation, Information Integration, and Automated Service Composition.


Invited keynote talks (partial list)
- ER Online Summer Seminars (EROSS 2020), 2020
- Data Ecosystems: Sovereign Data Exchange among Organizations, Dagstuhl Seminar 19391, 2019
- 31st International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 2019
- 7th ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics, 2017
- CSWR Third Annual Workshop, Santiago, Chile, 2017
- British Logic Colloquium, 2016
- Third International Workshop on Big Data and Computational Intelligence, 2016
- 3rd International Workshop on Big Data and Computational Intelligence, 2016
- 8th IEEE International Conference on Service Oriented Computing & Applications (SOCA), 2015
- Semantic Days 2013 - Business Intelligence and Semantics, Semantic Days 2013
- On The Move Federated Conferences and Workshops , OTM 2012
- 6th Alberto Mendelzon International Workshop on Foundations of Data Management, AMW 2012
- 13th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, KR 2012
- International Workshop on Global Scientific Data Infrastructures: The Findability Challenge, 2012.
- 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2011
- 13th International Conference on Advances in Design Sciences and Technology, EuropIA 13, 2011
- International Workshop on Global Scientific Data Infrastructures: The Big Data Challenges, 2011
- Lectio Magistralis at the Università di Roma La Sapienza, 2010
- 11th AI*IA Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 2010
- 6th International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods, WS-FM 2009
- Workshop on 'Data Management and Visual Analytics, DMVA 2009
- Workshop on Natural Language Processing, NLP 2008
- International Workshop on Logic in Databases, LID 2008
- DELOS Conference on Digital Libraries, DELOS 2007
- International Workshop on Inconsistency and Incompleteness in Databases, IIDB 2006
- Annual Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Informatics, SOFSEM 2005 - International Workshop on
Exchange and Integration of Data, EID 2004
- International Workshop on Data Integration over the Web DIW 2004
- International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2003
- ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, PODS 2002
- IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, LICS 2002
- International Workshop on Description Logics, DL 2002
- International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, LPNMR 2001 - International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, COOPIS 2001
- 7th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation Meets Databases, KRDB 2000
- International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 1999
- 6th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, KR 1998
- 1st International Workshop on Knowledge Representation Meets Databases, KRDB 1994.


Services to the community

- Organization of conferences and workshops
- Co-organizer of the Advanced School on Data Exchange, Integration, and Streams, DEIS 2010, Dagsthul, Germany
- Co-organizer of the Bertinoro Workshop on Data and Service Integration, INFINT 2009
- Co-organizer of the Bertinoro Workshop on Information Integration, INFINT 2007
- Organizer of the Bertinoro PhD School on Data and Service Integration, DASI 2006
- Conference Chair of the 13th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems, SEBD 2005
- Organizer of the 9th International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 2003
- Organizer of the 8th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation meets Databases, KRDB 2001
- Conference Chair of the 18th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 1999
- Organizer of the Fifth Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 1997
- Organizer and Program Chair of the Fifth Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 1997
- Organizer of the 1995 International Workshop on Description Logics, DL 1995
- Co-Organizer of the 1994 International Workshop on Description Logics, DL 1994
- Organizer of the 1990 Workshop of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 1990
- Co-Organizer of the International Workshop on Inheritance Hierarchies in Knowledge Representation and Programming Languages, 1989

- Program Chair and program committees
- Co-Chair of the 29th International Workshop on Description Logics, DL 2016, Cape Town, South Africa
- Area Chair (Data integration, metadata management, and interoperability) for the 30th International Conference on Data Engineering, IEEE ICDE 2014
- Program co-Chair of the 7th Alberto Mendelzon International Workshop on Foundations of Data Management, AMW 2013
- Area Chair of the 21st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-09
- Program Chair of the 27th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, PODS 2008
- Program Co-Chair of the The 5th International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics, ODBASE 2006
- Program Chair of the 9th International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 2003
- Program Chair of the 8th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation meets Databases, KRDB 2001
- Program Co-Chair of the Fourth International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, COOPIS 1999
- Program Chair of the Fifth Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 1997
- Program Chair of the 1995 International Workshop on Description Logics, DL 1995

He has been regularly a member of the Program Committee of the most important international conferences in the above fields including International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, ACM Conference on the Principles on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, ACM Conference on the Principles of Database Systems, IEEE Logics in Computer Science, Extending Database Technologies, International Conference on Conceptual Modelling, International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, International Conference on Database Theory. He is a member of the PODS Executive Committee, of the ICDT Council (board of the International Conference of Database Theory), and of the IFIP working group in "Data semantics".

- Membership in Steering and Evaluation Committees
2000 - 2002: Steering Committee of the Description Logics Workshop series
2001 - present: Steering Committee of the International Conference on Database Theory
2003 - 2008: Steering Committee of the IFIP WG 2.6 on Data Semantics
2005 - present: Steering Committee of the Italian Association for Advanced Database Systems
2006 - 2016: Steering Committee of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems
2013 - 2017: In the ACM SIGMOD Awards Committee from 2013 to 2017 (President of the committee in 2016)

He has acted as reviewer of several research and industrial projects, in particolar in Austria, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Israel, The Nederlands, Spain, United States, Sweden, and Switzerland.


- Journal Editorial Boards (current):
- Area Editor of Information Systems - An International Journal for the area of Data Modeling and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Techniques
- Area Editor of Logic Journal of the IGPL (Oxford Journal of the Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logic), for the area of Logic
for Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web
- Area Editor of Journal of Applied Logic for the area of Logic for Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web
- Associate Editor of ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality (JDIQ)
- Editorial Board of the LMCS - Logical Methods in Computer Science, for the areas of Database theory and Logic for knowledge
representation. "Logical Methods in Computer Science" is a fully refereed, open access, free, electronic journal
- Editorial Board of Big Data Research, Elsevier
- Editorial Board of Intelligenza Artificiale, The International Journal of the AI*IA

Associations (current):
- Member of the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM)
- Member of Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
- Member of the Associazione Senso Comune
- Member of European Association for Theoretical Computer Science