In the Living Memory of Prof.
Marco Somalvico

Marco Somalvico (10.10.1941-17.11.2002) was born in Como and obtained the "Dottore Ingegnere" Degree in Electronics Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 1965.

Since then he has been with the Computer Engineering section of the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione of the Politecnico di Milano, as research associate (1965-1971), as assistant professor (1972-1974), as associate professor (1974-1978), and finally as full professor (from 1978).

In 1971, he founded the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Project at the Politecnico di Milano, that performs basic and applied research in artificial intelligence and robotics.

The several courses he taught at the Politecnico di Milano include "Artificial Intelligence" (from 1990), "Robotics" (from 1986), "Advanced Programming", "Discrete Mathematics", and "Knowledge Engineering and Expert Systems".
At the Politecnico di Milano, Marco Somalvico has been member of the commission for the "Human Sciences Strategic Studies" and the Rector's delegate for the "Disabled Students Problems".

He has been visiting scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Computer Science Department of the Stanford University, USA (1969-1972, 1977, 1986) and, as British Research Council Fellow, at the Department of Computational Logic of the School of Artificial Intelligence of the University of Edinburgh, UK (1972).

Marco Somalvico has been member of the editorial board of the Journal of Robotic Systems and Applications (1975-1990) and of the program committee of the International Symposium on Robots of the International Federation of Robotics (1982, 1984, 1987). He has been the chairman of the local arrangement committee of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence held in Milan, Italy, in 1987. Moreover, he has been member of a number of committees and institutions, including the CEI (Italian Ecclesiastic Conference) "Social Communications" commission and the Insubria Institute for Superior Studies "Gerolamo Cardano".Finally, he co-founded the SIRI (Industrial Robotics Italian Society) in 1975 and the AI*IA (Italian Association for the Artificial Intelligence) in 1987.

His research activity has been devoted to methods for automatic problem solving, to natural language understanding, to artificial vision systems, to intelligent robotics, to multiagent systems, to virtual museums, to systems supporting disabled people, and to philosophical aspects of artificial intelligence. He has been author of five books and more than 150 scientific publications on international journals and proceedings of international conferences.

In 1998, Marco Somalvico has been awarded with the Joseph Engelberger Robotics Award for "contributing to the advancement of the science of robotics in the service of mankind".