Francesco Scarcello received the PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Calabria in 1997.
He is a professor of computer science (SSD ING-INF/05) at the University of Calabria.
His research interests are computational complexity, graph and hypergraph theory, constraint satisfaction, logic programming,
knowledge representation, non-monotonic reasoning, and database theory.
He has extensively published in all these areas in leading conferences and journals.
In particular, in database theory he solved some open problems on the complexity of acyclic conjunctive queries (Journal of the ACM 48(3):431-498,2001),
and on some techniques to identify tractable classes of queries. From these studies the idea of a new notion of degree of cyclicity for hypergraphs,
called hypertree-width came out. It turned out that this notion is the best technique for identifying tractable classes of hard problems,
in that it is able to single out the largest islands of tractability among all other methods previously known in the literature
(Artif. Intell. 124(2): 243-282, 2000, J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 64(3): 579-627, 2002, J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 66(4): 775-808, 2003, J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 73(3): 475-506, 2007).
He participated in a number of national and international projects dealing with database and knowledge representation systems.
In particular, the notions and the algorithms proposed in his Phd thesis have been used for developing DLV,
a widely used knowledge-base management system based on disjunctive logic programming (Inf. Comput. 135(2): 69-112, 1997, ACM Trans. Comput. Log. 7(3): 499-562, 2006).
Professor Scarcello holds his current position since 2001.
Before that, he was recipient of two grants from the Italian National Research Council (CNR) until 1999, when he became an assistant professor at the University of Calabria.
Also, during these years, he has been visiting the Department of Information Systems at the Vienna University of Technology.
Professor Scarcello serves on program committees and as a reviewer for many international conferences and journals.
Moreover, he has been Associate Editor of the Artificial Intelligence journal (Elsevier).
He is co-recipient of the 2008 IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize, awarded to an outstanding paper published in the
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research in the preceding five calendar years.
He is co-recipient of the 2009 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award,
awarded every year to a paper published
in the proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) ten years prior that had the most impact in terms of research,
methodology, or transfer to practice over the intervening decade.
Contact
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Modellistica, Elettronica e Sistemistica
Via P. Bucci, 41C, III Piano
87030, Arcavacata di Rende (CS)
