Position: Assistant Professor
Current Research Base:
The Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informatica (Department of Electronics and Informatics - DEI) of the University of Padova was established on June 1987. It has been joined by scientists formerly working in the Institute of Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering, in the Faculty of Statistics, and in the Department of Psychology. The staff of DEI includes 23 full professors, 26 associate professors, 19 researchers and assistant professors, more that 44 PhD students and 23 technicians and administrative staff. Each year DEI is visited by professors and researchers of other academic and research institutions coming from different countries.
Research areas of interest of DEI are: bioengineering, applied and industrial electronics, quantum electronics and laser, theoretical and applied informatics, telecommunications and information theory, system and control theory. Specific areas of interest of theoretical and applied informatics are: artificial intelligence, information management systems, computer music, programming languages, operating system, parallel architectures, software engineering.
In the context of Mira, the research activities will be carried out by the ``Information Management Systems research group'' (IMS) of DEI. The group, directed by Prof. Agosti, is composed of 3 Associate Professors, 2 Assistant Professors and 4 PhD students. The IMS research group has a long experience of research in the Information Retrieval. Research topics which are specifically dealt with by the group are: modelling of multimedia data (e.g. texts, territorial data and images) and legal documents; extension of the object-oriented paradigm for the design of multimedia applications; hypertext and hypermedia information retrieval models and systems; evaluation of hypertext information retrieval systems; design and evaluation of modern online public access catalogue (OPAC) systems, uncertainty management, and hypertext based IR systems.
Most members of the IMS research group have strong teaching and research relations with the Faculty of Statistics of the University of Padua.
Experience in research and development:
Crestani holds a degree in Statistics from the University of Padua (Italy) and a MSc in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow (Scotland). He is also completing a PhD in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow.
Cretani has been external consultant for the C.N.R. (Italian national research council) under the project "Banca dati dei progetti di ricerca del C.N.R.'' ad under the project: ``Progetto Finalizzato Sistemi Informatici e Calcolo Parallelo, Sottoprogetto 5, Sistemi Evoluti per Basi di Dati''.
He has been Research assistant (January 1990 - September 1992) at the Department of of the Computing Science of the University of Glasgow working in several research projects: for the London Research Station of the British Gas Plc for the implementation of an IR system with partial and full matching, for the ESPRIT Basic Research Project 5398 ``SHAPE'' (Second generation Hypertext Application Project Environment), and for the ESPRIT Basic Research Project N.8134 ``FERMI'' (Formalisation and Experimentation of the Retrieval of Multimedia Information).
Since September 1992 he is Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the la Facolta' di Scienze Statistiche Demografiche ed Attuariali (Statistical Sciences) of the Universita' di Padova where he has been involved in MULTIDATA, the Italian National Research Council (CNR) project on multimedia databases. He has been on leave for two years at the Computing Science Department of the University of Glasgow, and he is currently involved in several projects, such as the ESPRIT Working Group N. 6576 ``MIRO'' (Multimedia Information Retrieval), and the ESPRIT Basic Research Project N.8134 ``FERMI''.
Other members of the Information Management Systems Group have long experience in research and development. In particular, members of the group had a leader role in the research project SBN (Italian National Library Automation Project), in the ESPRIT N.6606 ``IDOMENEUS'' Network of Excellence (Prof. Agosti is the domain Leader for Information Retrieval and Multimedia), in the EEC Project ``JUKEBOX'' (LIB-JUKEBOX/4-1049), and in the project ``DUO'' for the design and development of an OPAC that serves the universities of the Veneto Region (in the North-East of Italy): Padova, Venice and Verona.
References:
[1] Fabio Crestani.
Learning strategies for an adaptive information retrieval system
using neural networks. Proceedings of the 1993 IEEE International Conference on Neural Networks, pages 244--249, S.Francisco, California, USA, March 1993.
[2] Fabio Crestani.
Domain knowledge acquisition for information retrieval using neural networks. International Journal of Applied Expert Systems 2(2):101 -- 116, 1994.
[3] M. Agosti, Fabio Crestani and M. Melucci.
Tachir: a tool for the automatic construction of hypertexts for information retrieval. In Proceedings of the 1994 RIAO Conference, New York, USA, October 1994.
[4] M. Agostir, Fabio Crestani and M. Melucci.
Automatic authoring and construction of hypertexts for information retrieval. ACM Multimedia Systems, February 1995.
[5] Fabio Crestani and C.J. van Rijsbergen.
Information retrieval by logical imaging. Journal of Documentation, 51(1):1 -- 15, March 1995.