Paola Mello received her degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1982, and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1989. She is enrolled, at present, as Full Professor, at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Bologna, where she teaches Artificial Intelligence and Foundations of Computer Science. She was member of the scientific board of the PhD Course of Electronics, Computer Science and Telecomunications at the University of Bologna and from 2008 to 2011 the Coordinator of this PhD Program.
She has been Associate Editor the Internazionale Artificial Intelligence Review e Chair of the Working Group on Ethics of Informatics Europe.
Moreover, She was member of the scientific board of the PhD program in Computer Science and Engineering. From 2010 to 2014 she was the President of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence. From 2012 to 2015 she was the Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Bologna. Currently She is member of Accademia delle Scienze. In 2017, She has been nominated fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI).
Paola Mello’s research focuses on artificial intelligence. Particular emphasis is about knowledge representation and reasoning, computational logic, logic programming, multi-agent systems, decision support systems and machine learning, with applications in different area with particular reference to e-Health. Research on declarative knowledge representation techniques lead to novel integrations of rule-based and probabilistic approaches with classical logic-based approaches for temporal, hypothetical and ontology-based reasoning to deal with uncertainty. She has also contributed novel algorithms and reasoning tools, which have been applied to domains involving complex, distributed and heterogeneous processes, such as Web services orchestrations, data-aware business processes, socio-technical systems, and computerized clinical guidelines. Moreover, She has contributed cutting-edge technology for run-time and a-posteriori verification techniques, used to monitor process conformance to regulations, standards, protocols, and legal aspects.
Her research has covered implementation, application and theoretical aspects and She is author of about 200 national and international publications. She participated to program committees of national and international workshops and conferences. She has been involved in the organization of international events, workshops and conferences, and she has given tutorials.
She took part to several national (Progetti Finalizzati and MURST) and international (UE) research projects in the context of computational logic. In particular, she was involved, as research coordinator for Bologna University, in COMPUNET EC Network, (where she took part of the Executive Council), in the Esprit ALPES EC project in the CRAFT EC project "Paint manufacturing process optimization for the building industry, using original bases and pigments formulation" and in the SOCS UE IST project: ”A computational logic model for the description, analysis and verification of global and open societies of heterogeneous computees”.
Within this project, she faced the topic of modeling/verifying peers interaction protocols, following an approach based on computational logic.
More recently, she participate to the following FP7 EU projects: ePolicy (2011-2014) - Engineering the Policy Making Life Cycle, FARSEEING, (2011-2014) - prediction, identification and prevention of falls and COLOMBO (2012-2015) - Cooperative Self-Organizing System for low Carbon Mobility at low Penetration Rates.
The research is developed in collaboration with Universities and research centers worldwide (e.g. Eindhoven Technical University, Imperial College of Science - Technology and Medicine, Universitade Nova de Lisboa) and with national industries and regional laboratories.
She has a great experience in developing systens based on medical knowledge, within national and regional funded projects for technological transfer.
In collaboration with the Univerisity of Ferrara she took part to the design and implementation of some knowldge based software systems for the validation of clinical and laboratory data.
In particular, the DN-SEV expert system for the validation of clinical laboratory data is currently used with very good results at the S.Orsola-Malpighi Hospital.
She is currently taking part to the Inter-dipartimental Center of Industrial Research for Life Sciences and Health tecnologies.
