Domenico Dato

Domenico Dato holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, a degree in Computer Engineering magna cum laude from the University of Rome and has more than 25 years of experience in Information Technology. He started working on search engines and information retrieval systems in 1990.

From 1992 to 1995 he worked as system administrator and network manager for some of the most important Italian Internet Service Providers, managing Linux servers, Cisco routers and portal services. In 1995 he joined Medialab at University of Pisa and was involved in research projects for Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems. In 1996 he joined Olivetti Telemedia working in the team that developed Arianna, the first Italian Web search engine. From 1997 to 1998 he was consultant for the University of Pisa, Italia Online, Sias Srl (Gruppo L’Espresso) and other research institutions and companies, working on the development of information retrieval systems and tools for automatic classification and indexing of Web documents.

In January 1999 he founded Ideare SpA, a company working on search engines technologies and on algorithms for the analysis of both textual and multimedia content. In few years Ideare SpA became the Italian market leader in the search sector and developed search services and knowledge management tools for several national and international companies (Dada, Mediaset, Fiat, CDC, Gruner & Jahr, Excite, Espresso Group, etc.). As Technical Director of Ideare SpA, Domenico developed search engines for Web pages, Audio and Video files, Images, Usenet groups, price comparison and News. He was also involved in the development of automatic classification engines, crawling systems and Information Retrieval libraries. In 2000 Ideare has been acquired by Tiscali SpA, one of the largest European ISP.

In 2005,  as Research & Development Manager of the Tiscali Group, Domenico collaborated to the development of Janas, a search engine distributed in more than 15 European countries. Within Tiscali he was also coordinator of several scientific projects funded by MIUR or the European Commission in the sectors of search, multimedia analysis, fraud detection and Cloud computing (DART, AXMEDIS, ALICANTE, ANTIPHISH, CONTRAIL, GOLDUI, ESSE3, etc.). Within Tiscali Domenico also realized the historical archives and search portals of many national newspapers, including La Repubblica and L’Unita’.

Domenico is consultant for the European Commission and served as reviewer in several EU projects, including PHAROS, ISEARCH, SOCIALSENSOR, REVEAL, InEVENT, CHORUS, CHORUS+, 3DTVS, CUBRIK, GLOCAL, SMART, INVID, COGNITUS.

Domenico is a licensed radio amateur since 1989 and contributed in setting up the first Italian gateway used for the transmission of TCP/IP packets over radio links.