Previously, he has been on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA (1998-1999) and Politecnico di Milano, Italy (1999-2006). He received his M.Sc. from Politecnico di Milano (1993) and Ph.D. from Politecnico di Torino, Italy (1998). He has served as the Program Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Mobile Agents in 2001. The goal of his current research is to support the development of modern distributed systems through the investigation of appropriate programming abstractions, along with communication protocols to efficiently support them. His work spans the research fields of software engineering, middleware, and networking, and is geared in particular towards wireless sensor networks, mobile computing, and large-scale distributed systems.