He received a Laurea degree in Mathematics from University of Rome “La Sapienza” in 1983 and a PhD in Computing Science from University of Glasgow in 2003. Since 1986, he is researcher at Fondazione Ugo Bordoni. His background is in mathematical logic and its applications to Computer Science.
He first designed and developed Terrier, a modular IR framework for effective and scalable information retrieval systems. Terrier is based on his Divergence From Randomness models for Information Retrieval (DFR).
His interests include web, enterprise, blog and vertical search, information extraction and question answering. He was Co-Chair of the main European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2007), and Poster Co-Chair of the main ACM Conference on IR, SIGIR 2007. He is the editor of the Information Retrieval Models area for the Encyclopedia of Database Systems edited by Springer.