Interview with Diego Calvanese
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INTERVIEW
Interview with Diego Calvanese Diego Calvanese1,2 · Mantas Šimkus3 Received: 10 October 2020 / Accepted: 12 October 2020 © Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
1 Interview
Diego Calvanese is a full professor at the Research Center for Knowledge and Data (KRDB), Free University of BozenBolzano (Italy) and Wallenberg Guest Professor in Artificial Intelligence for Data Management at Umeå University (Sweden). He studied Electrical Engineering at Sapienza University in Rome, worked as a software developer for one and a half years in Innsbruck (Austria), and then completed his PhD in Rome. In 2003 he moved to Bolzano and built up an internationally renown research group working on knowledge representation and data management.
* Mantas Šimkus [email protected] Diego Calvanese [email protected] 1
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
2
Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
3
TU Wien, Vienna, Austria
When did you become interested in science, and specifically in Computer Science? What was your first experience with computers? As far back as I can remember, I have always been interested in technology and in understanding how things work. Science fiction movies were the ones I liked most, because of the possible future technologies they presented. And computers and programming fascinated me from early on. When I went to middle school, laptops did not exist, and the early PCs were out of reach for me, so I resorted to programmable calculators from HP, first the HP-33C, then the HP-41C, and later the HP-28S. My information source was the monthly CHIP magazine, which presented news and info about pocket calculators, programming, and later home computing. And I was also an avid reader of Scientific American. I still have a subscription to the Italian version, while initially I read the original English version, as a means to practice English. When did you become interested in logic? Specifically, Description Logics (DLs) play an important role in your research. What was your first contact with DLs? The interest in logic came later, during my studies in Electrical Engineering in Rome, and was somehow triggered when I read Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. The book blew me away, and I immediately wanted to know more about Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and understand logic better. So I attended a course on Logic by Giacomo Jacopini and one on abstract computing machines by Corrado Böhm, both offered at the Faculty of Mathematics. I discovered only later that the two were quite famous, for a fundamental result they had obtained in the 1960’s on the theory of computation. For the course by Böhm, I worked on a project in which I implemented an interpreter for a language based on combinatorial operators. But I lacked background on some basic Computer Science subjects, and I remember that only later, when I took a course on compiler technology, I realized that for that
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