Massimo is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Padua, a Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the Chief Technology Officer of Atomium Culture, the Permanent Platform for European Excellence. In July 2004, he was honored with the TR35 prize by MIT Technology Review as one of the 35 top researchers in the world under the age of 35.

 

Massimo is the creator of several world-impact technologies, including:

• P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences), the global standard for web privacy

• XML-Query (XQuery), the world standard for semi-structured data handling

• Web Ontology Language (OWL), the world standard for web knowledge

• APPEL, the proposed world standard for privacy selection

• Metalog, the world’s first semantic web system

• Volunia, the world’s first social search engine and meta mappings system

• SEP (Search Engine Persuasion), the world’s first formal study, now known as SEO

• Hyperinformation, the world’s first hyper technique for search engines

• HyperSearch, the world’s first hyper search engine, a forerunner to Google, presented at the Sixth International WWW Conference in 1997. Massimo’s HyperSearch was the first search engine to rank results based on the relationship between individual pages and the entire web, rather than just page rank. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, cited HyperSearch when introducing their PageRank algorithm in their original paper in 1998 and in their subsequent patent.

 

Massimo is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Open Journal of Web Technologies (OJWT) and serves as a co-founder and Executive Committee member of the European Commission Network of Excellence on Web Reasoning, REWERSE.

 

His accolades include the Gini Foundation Award for innovative research, the IBM Young Scientist Award, the Lifetime Membership Award from the Oxford Society for his lifetime achievements and efforts in developing the XML Query standard, and the Masi Award.

 

Massimo has tackled several significant open research problems, including:

• The longstanding modularity problem in rewriting systems (published in Journal of Symbolic Computation)

• The existential termination problem in logic programs

• The constrained evolution of neural networks

 

He holds a Ph.D. in Computational Mathematics and Computer Science, with a thesis that won the EATCS Best Ph.D. Thesis Award for the invention of local analysis in programming languages. Massimo has published 70 research papers, cited in over 4,000 papers.