Letizia Tanca studied Mathematics at the University of Naples, where she obtained her Master’s degree in Mathematical Logic and her Ph.D. in Applied Maths and Computer Science in 1988. Meanwhile, she also worked for four years as a software engineer in two Telecommunication companies. Later, she was with Politecnico di Milano first as a research associate and then as an associate professor. She joined the University of Verona in 1995 and stayed there as the chair of the Computer Science course until 1998.
Letizia Tanca is currently with Politecnico di Milano as a full professor. She has held the chair of the degree and master courses in Computer Science and Engineering of Politecnico di Milano, Leonardo campus, from 2000 to 2006, and currently chairs the Computer Science and Engineering Area of her department (DEIB – Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria). She has taught and teaches courses on Databases, the Foundations of Computer Science, and Information Systems Technologies.
Letizia is the author of about one hundred and fifty papers on databases and database theory, published in international journals and conferences, and of the book “Logic Programming and Databases”, coauthored with S. Ceri and G. Gottlob. More recently, she has edited the book “Semantic Web Information Management”. She has been the local leader of several national and international projects. Her research interests have ranged over all database theory, especially on deductive, active and object oriented databases, graph-based languages for databases, the semantics of advanced database and information systems, representation and querying of semistructured information. She has recently contributed to an Informatics Europe Report on Experimentation in Informatics (http://www.informatics-europe.org/images/documents/informatics-experimentation_2013.pdf).
Her most recent research interests concern context-based personalization in databases and in information systems, data management in pervasive systems and Big Data analytics. On these more recent topics she has delivered several talks and PhD courses, among which a keynote talk at ACM SAC 2012 and an invited talk at the IBM Academic Days 2014.
Letizia Tanca has been a referee for several top international journals, and a member of the program committee of a large number of international conferences. She is an associate editor for the 2014 edition of PVLDB (the Journal version of the VLDB 2014 Conference). She is currently the representative of her department in the Collaborative Innovation Center on Big Data Analytics, established between Politecnico di Milano and IBM since June 2013, and in the Informatics Europe association, in whose board she has served from 2006 to 2012. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Informatics Europe Department Evaluation Initiative and a member of the Expert Pool of the EQANIE european association. She has been the conference Chair of the ECSS 2011 (European Computer science Summit).
