Riccardo Torlone is a full professor in the area of Information Systems at Università Roma Tre. He received his Dr. Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from Università di Roma "La Sapienza". Before joining Università Roma Tre, he was member of the research staff at IASI-CNR in Rome, where he has still a research appointment. He also had a visiting research appointment at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). His research has considered various topics in the database field, including the following: relational database theory, active and deductive databases, CASE tools for database design, models and languages for object-oriented databases, data warehouses and OLAP systems, Web based information systems, integration and transformation of heterogeneous databases, adaptive systems and personalization. He has published his research results in the major journals of the field, including ACM Transactions of Database Systems, VLDB Journal, Information Systems, SIAM Journal of Computing, IEEE Transaction on Data and Knowledge Engineering, Distributed and Parallel Databases and in the refereed proceedings of all the major conferences (ACM-SIGMOD, VLDB, EDBT, ACM-PODS, IEEE-ICDE, ICDT, ER). He has authored the most spread book on databases in Italy, published also in an international edition and in several versions. He has also authored two other books. He has organized many national and international scientific events (conferences and schools). He is member of the editorial board of an international journal on computer science and has been program committee member for many international conferences. He is currently serving as a member of the EDBT Association. He has been responsible of several research projects funded by the European Commission and by several public and private italian institutions. He was the chair of the PhD program in Computer Engineering at Università Roma Tre and he is currently the chair of the undergraduate and master programs in Computer Engineering at Università Roma Tre.