Dr. Domenico Laforenza is Director of the Institute for Informatics and Telematics (www.iit.cnr.it) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) since 1 July 2008.
He is also head of the Registry for domain names for Italy (ccTLD “.IT” – www.nic.it ).
He was responsible for the High Performance Computing Laboratory (http://hpc.isti.cnr.it/) at the CNR Institute of Information Science and Technologies (www.isti.cnr.it) until 30 June 2008.
From June 2006 to September 2009 Dr. Laforenza was member of the Scientific Council of the CNR Department of Information and Communication Technologies (http://www.ict.cnr.it/).
On January 2008 he was appointed as a member of the Scientific Council of the Institute de Grilles (http://www.idgrilles.fr/) of the French CNRS.
On March 2009 Dr. Laforenza was appointed as Italian representative to the European Union “Future Internet Forum of the Member States” by the Italian Ministry of Research, Education and University.
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/foi/lead/fif/index_en...
Dr. Domenico Laforenza has been appointed to the EURid Board of Directors since the 29th of April 2009 (http://www.eurid.eu/en/about/management/biographies#Domenico)
Dr. Laforenza is also scientific director of the ISTI-CRMPA section, created in 2003 with an agreement between the Research Centre in Pure and Applied Mathematics (CRMPA, http://www.crmpa.it/) of the University of Salerno and ISTI-CNR, with the aim of proposing and carrying out joint research and development projects in Grid technologies for e-Science and e-Business.
He was born in Acquaviva delle Fonti (Bari) on September 26, 1952.
Dr. Laforenza received the doctoral degree in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science of University of Pisa in 1977. Since 1997. He started work at CNUCE in 1972 where, during his period of employment, he was operator, programmer and performance evaluator until 1981.
Since 1981 he has been researcher in Computer Science. His main areas of interest are: high performance computing, parallel and distributed systems programming, Grid and Internet computing.
From 1989 to 1994, within the framework of the CNR Project “Informatics Systems and Parallel Computing”, he was responsible for the Support Group on Parallel Computing, aiming at encouraging the exploitation of methodologies and techniques of parallel computing towards the Italian industry and SMEs.
From 1996 to 2006 Dr. Laforenza was professor of Parallel and Distributed Applications at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa.
He has been supervisor of PhD schools in Italy (University of Pisa) and abroad (Università Complutense of Madrid, University of Dortmund, University of Montpellier and University of Rennes/INRIA).
Dr. Laforenza is author of numerous publications and organiser of national and international ICT events.
In the past, he has been appointed as responsible for several national projects (High Performance Computing and Grid Computing) by CNR and MIUR (Italian Ministry of Education, Research and University).
Since 2004, he has participated, as CNR scientific coordinator, in numerous European ICT projects (FP6: CoreGrid, NextGrid, GridCoord, XtreemOS, GridComp, Challengers, and FP7: S-CUBE).
Since 1999, Dr. Laforenza has regularly carried out project reviewing for the European Union, within various Framework Programmes (FP5, FP6 e FP7) in the sector of Information Society Technologies.
Since 2002 he is included in the national directory of accredited experts of the Italian Ministry of Education, Research, and University (MIUR) and of the Ministry of Productive Activities (MiPA). In the past he was involved in the evaluation of several national R&D projects (FAR, FIT, FESR, etc.).
Furthermore, he has also been reviewer for the national Committee for Evaluation of Research in Italy (CIVR).
In 2002-2003 he was member of the Grid Forum Steering Committee (GFSC) (www.ggf.org), management body of the most important standardisation organisation regarding Grid technology, and was co-Director of “Grid Performance and Information Services”.
Since September 2004, he has been chairman of the Members General Assembly (MGA) of “CoreGrid: the European Research Network on Foundations, Software Infrastructures and Applications for large scale distributed, GRID and Peer-to-Peer”. (EU-IST-FP6-004265 http://www.coregrid.net/).
Since June 2006, he has been chairman of the Governing Board of the European project “XtreemOS” (EU IST-FP6-033576, http://www.xtreemos.org/)
Since March 2008 he has been Activity Leader (IA-1) and Workpackage Leader (WP-IA-1.2) in the European Network of Excellence “S-CUBE” (EU IST-FP7-215483 http://www.s-cube-network.eu/).
In the period 2003-2007 he was member of an independent group of experts, known as “Next Generation Grid Expert Group”, selected by the Directorate General Information Technology, Research Networking, European Commission, with the aim of designing a vision of the priorities of future research in the sector of Grid technologies. http://www.cordis.lu/ist/grids/pub-report.htm
In the past (2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008), he has carried out consultancy services for EU member research agencies (Austria, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Holland) as an evaluator of important research and development initiatives (e.g. UK eScience Programme) and project proposals.
In June 2005 Dr. Laforenza was nominated member of the Comité d’évaluation, within the Action de Recherche Amont (ARA) – Masses de Données: Modélisation, Simulation et Applications (MDMSA), representing the French National Research Agency and the Department of Science and Information Communications Technology (STIC) of the CNRS. (Ref. http://www.gip-anr.fr/appels/listecomite.htm). The position was renewed in 2006, 2007 and 2008.
In 2007 he was member of the Experts Commission for the selection of Italian candidates for the EURYI (European Young Investigator) Awards, 4th competition 2006-2007.
For further and more detailed information, please visit the following websites:
http://miles.isti.cnr.it/~lafo/domenico/Main_Page.html
http://hpc.isti.cnr.it/~lafo/domenico/Main_Page.html
