I got my first degree, a Laurea (BSc / MSc) in Computer Science, from the University of Torino, Department of Computer Science, in 1986, with a dissertation on using knowledge representation techniques to improve NL interfaces to data bases. My dissertation was done in collaboration with Paolo Baggia, thanks to a fellowship from CSELT Laboratories in Torino. I then went to work for CSELT on using semantics in spoken language understanding systems.
In 1987 I moved to the University of Hamburg to participate in the WISBER project, developing a dialogue interface to expert systems (a variety of papers on WISBER are cited here). The project was a collaboration between the Universities of Hamburg and Saarbruecken and research groups at Nixdorf and Siemens. I worked on developing knowledge representation tools to support NL interpretation, and particularly on temporal reasoning.
In 1988 I moved to the Department of Computer Science , University of Rochester , where I got my PhD with a dissertation on scope disambiguation (1994) and participated in the TRAINS project.
In 1994, I went to the Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh, to participate in the FRACAS project, looking at computational semantics in general and underspecification and dialogue more specifically. I then got a five-year EPSRC Advanced Fellowship at the Human Communication Research Centre and the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems of the Division of Informatics. While there, I got involved in the organization of the SEMDIAL series of workshops and organized the first Workshop on Cognitively Plausible Models of Semantic Processing (SEMPRO-2001) .
In 2001, I got a Senior Lectureship at the Department
of Computer Science,
University of Essex. The Department merged in 2007 with the
Department of Electronic Systems and Engineering to form the Department
of Computing and Electronic Systems.