He obtained a degree in electronic engineering from Politecnico di Milano, and a PhD in computer engineering from Politecnico di Torino. His research interests are in the field of databases, in particular database models and languages, data mining, XML, and workflow systems. He participated in several European-funded research projects in the database field, such as the IDEA Project (development of an active, deductive, and object-oriented database system), Mietta (on multilingual information extraction), and cInq (Consortium on Knowledge Discovery by Inductive Queries).