Foreword: Algorithms, Strings and Theoretical Approaches in the Big Data Era – Special Issue in Honor of the 60th Birthday of Professor Raffaele Giancarlo(Editorial)

Abstract

Raffaele Giancarlo was born in 1957 in Salerno, Italy. He received his Laurea Degree in Computer Science from the University of Salerno in 1982. His Laurea thesis on combinatorial algorithms on words was supervised by Professor Alberto Apostolico. Some years later, in 1984, he was one of the few young researchers attending the Advanced Research Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms on Words held at Maratea (Italy). In the same year, he won a public competition for an Assistant Professor position at University of Salerno. He also decided to pursue graduate studies in the US. Raffaele Giancarlo obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1990, defending one of the first Ph.D. thesis on algorithms and computational biology under the supervision of Professor Zvi Galil. In 1991 he attended the first formal edition of the Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM) conference, which was organized at Royal Halloway and Bedford New College (University of London). He has held several permanent or visiting scientist positions at many research labs and universities both in USA and Europe such as A T & T Bell Labs, Bell Labs of Lucent Technologies, A T & T Shannon Laboratories, University of Salerno, University of Palermo, Max Plank Institute for Molecular Genetics, INRIA, CNRS. He is currently Full Professor of Computer Science at University of Palermo. Professor Giancarlo is a specialist of design and analysis of combinatorial algorithms, with particular emphasis on string algorithms, ranging from data compression to bioinformatics. His scientific production consists of more than 90 papers appeared in established journals, conferences and book chapters. Moreover, he is coauthor of many patents, granted by the US Patent Office, in information retrieval. He is one of the funding members of Algorithms for Molecular Biology and of the Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI). He has been the scientific director of one of the first Summer Schools in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, which received more than 200 applications. He1 serves on the editorial boards of Theoretical Computer Science, BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Research Notes and he has served either as chairman or as a member of the scientific committees for many conferences, such as CPM, SPIRE, WABI, RECOMB, ICALP, COCOON. He has been invited keynote speaker to several conferences and summer schools, including SIAM International Conference in Applied Mathematics and the Ettore Majorana Center for the Advancement of Science. He has also been the principal investigator of several Italian Ministry of Education research projects in bioinformatics and one CNRS Grant. Professor Giancarlo has been the first President of the Computer Science Curricula at University of Palermo and he has been member of the Italian Computer Science Curricula Commission of the Italian Association of Computer Science Researchers (GRIN). He is currently on the board of directors of the CINI Consortium, that represents all of the academic competences in Computer Science and Engineering present in Italy. In particular, for that Consortium, he is founding member and on the board of InfoLife, a national laboratory covering all aspects of bioinformatics in Italy. He is delegate to the research for the Department of Mathematics and Informatics, and delegate to the placement students for the School of Basic and Applied Sciences, at University of Palermo. Finally, he is a member of the University's Scientific Council, University of Palermo.