Professional Profile of Paolo Rocchi

Paolo Rocchi has been recognized as an Emeritus Docent at IBM for his outstanding achievements in basic and applied research. Rocchi is also a Contract Professor at Luiss University of Rome.

Rocchi received the degree in physics from the University of Rome in1969, and was associated to the same Institute of Physics as an assistant. Next year he joined IBM as an expert of computer assisted instruction (CAI), an innovative sector in those times, and managed a project on CAI in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Defense.
Later he implemented CIDI: a trail-blazing application. Rocchi was qualified as an "IBM inventor" for this linguistic software product, which ran for decades. Afterwards he led inquiries on the terminology used in professional environments.

Rocchi took interest in computer security in the early seventies, as one of the pioneers in this field. He has written a book on this topic. 

In the late seventies, Rocchi started investigations upon the principles of the hardware/software systems. Theoretical foundations of informatics cross several disciplines and he inquired a broad variety of themes over fifteen years with the aid of a small team of ibmers and academicians. The philosophical scenario and the formal key results began to be published in the nineties. Rocchi put forward a unitary logical framework for information, control and systems, which he expressed through mathematical formalism. Besides integration purposes, this work provided original contributions in special fields such as in  information theory, software methodology, edp analysis, reliability theory, and neuro-sciences.
In addition this new organization of knowledge yielded a rather natural introduction to computing and IBM released a novel base-course in Italy and abroad. Unfortunately this initiative failed in commercial terms in that customers prefer to take introductory lessons on computer science from schools and universities which have the monopoly over this educational area.

During the same decades, Rocchi produced results in the realm of the philosophy of mathematics, notably he put forward some ideas upon the interpretation of the probability which constitutes an open problem since three centuries.

Rocchi has written over one hundred works including twelve volumes, in particular:
Technology+Culture=Software     IOS Press, Amsterdam (2000).
The Structural Theory of Probability     Kluwer/Plenum, N.Y. (2003).
Logic of Analog and Digital Machines     Nova Science Publishers, N.Y. (2010).

Membership:
- AMS (American Mathematical Society)
- ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
- IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing)
- CSHPM (Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics)
- Coucil of AICA (Ass. Italiana per il Calcolo Automatico) (Roma)
- AI*IA (Artificial Intelligence Italian Association) (founder member)
- ICMM (Intl. Center for Math. Modeling) (Sweden) (former member of the advisory board)