Alessandro Panconesi is Professor of Computer Science at Sapienza University of Rome. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University and is the recipient of the 1992 ACM Danny Lewin Award. Panconesi has published more than 50 papers in international journals and selective conference proceedings and he is the associate editor of the Journal of Discrete Algorithms and the director of BiCi, the Bertinoro International Center of Informatics. His research spans areas of algorithmic research as diverse as randomized algorithms, distributed computing, complexity theory, experimental algorithmics, wireless networking and Web information retrieval.