Paolo Ciaccia was born on April 16th, 1959, in Peschiera del Garda (VR), Italy. In 1985 he graduated in Electronic Engineering at the University of Bologna, receiving for his thesis the "IBM-Italy Award", and in 1992 he obtained a PhD in Electronic and Computer Engineering. Since 2000 he is Full Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI) of the University of Bologna.
The research activity of Paolo Ciaccia mainly focuses mainly on modeling and optimization of the performance of systems for the management of large amounts of data. Currently he coordinates the research activity of DISI's MultiMedia Database Group and his main research interests include the treatment of similarity and preference-based queries, the study of techniques for searching, browsing and annotating multimedia databases, and ranking models for uncertain data. He is one of the creators of the M-tree, a metric data index that has become a benchmark for research in the field (the original work boasts about 2400 citations on Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user= ptflKEsAAAAJ) and used by countless research groups in the field of multimedia and data mining in the world.
He has participated in numerous national and international research projects, including LTR HERMES (Foundations of High Performance Multimedia Information Management Systems). In 1997-98 he was the national coordinator of the CNR MIDA project on modeling and querying of multimedia databases. From 2001 to 2004 he was responsible for the University of Bologna in the IST/FET PANDA project (Patterns for Next-Generation Database Systems). He was principal researcher in a three-year project funded by the Mexican agency CONACYT on the indexing of metric spaces. He has been local coordinator in three PRIN projects (respectively on Databases and Web, Peer-to-peer Databases, and Management of genomic data).
He has published over 100 papers in the fields of databases, neural networks, software engineering and autonomous systems, in major international journals and conferences (including VLDB, ACM-PODS, ACM-SIGMOD, EDBT, ICDE, and CIKM) in the database field. In particular, works by Paolo Ciaccia have appeared in the following journals:
- Journal of the ACM (1 paper):
- ACM Transactions on Database Systems (5 papers, second among the authors of Italian universities);
- ACM Transactions on Information Systems (1 paper);
- IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (4 papers);
- Information Systems (4 papars).
Based on the statistics collected by the site http://www.topdbitaly.com/ in 2015, Paolo Ciaccia occupied the 12th position among the "authors with an Italian affiliation who have published full, regular, peer-reviewed papers in the first-tier database conferences and journals ".
According to Goole Scholar, Paolo Ciaccia has h-index = 28, g-index = 74, and 5778 citations to his works (as of 02/15/2022).
He is the winner of two Best Paper Awards, awarded for the works "Modeling the Propagation of User Preferences" (ER 2011 international conference) and "Warping the Time on Data Streams" (SBBD 2005 international conference).
In 1999 he was program chair of the 1st International Workshop on Similarity Search, in 2002 and 2020 program co-chair of the Italian conference on advanced databases (SEBD), and in 2010 program chair of the 3rd International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications (SISAP).
From 1999 to 2003 he was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering journal, responsible for the areas of data structures and algorithms and spatial and multimedia data. From 2011 to 2017 he was Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Database Systems journal, unanimously considered the most prestigious in the database field.
From 2008 to 2012 he was the director of the Computing Center
(CCIB) of the Engineering Faculty.
