Our friend and colleague Antonio Picariello was born in Avellino on the 8th of December 1964 and has prematurely and unexpectedly disappeared on June, 23 2020.
After obtaining a Master in Electronic Engineering and a PhD in Information Technology at UNINA, in 2018 Antonio became full professor at the same university.
From 2001 to 2016 he collaborated as visiting researcher with the Insitute of Advanced Computing Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park, where he worked on Data Base Systems, Computational Social Networks and Sentiment Analysis,
obtaining wide recognition and an international patent. In 2005 he began teaching data base systems, in 2017 Big data Analystics and, in 2019, the "Software and Hardware Infrastructures for Big Data" in the UNINA master for Data Science; courses which he held until his death.
In 2016 he was appointed director of the National Laboratory ITEM on Informatics and Multimedia and member of the Board of the Inter-University Consortium CINI.
He was a member of the scientific advisory board of the CRISP Laboratory at the UNiversity of Milano Bicocca. In 2019 he also become coordinator of the Course in Ingegneria Informatica of UNINA.
Antonio has published many research papers on theoretical and implementative aspects of multimedia data, biga data analytics, Network analysis and Explainable Artificial Intelligence.
In 2018 he was among the main promoters of the new master (Laurea Magistrale) in Data Science at UNINA which started in the academic year 2019/2020.
More than anything else, Antonio was a wonderful person: warm, kind, loyal and always ready to help anyone who was in need. He was a fervent catholic and devoted all his spare time to his family and to many charitable organization, becoming deacon in 2015.
In June 2020 an aneurysm took his life leaving behind a hole which is impossible to fill.
The Picariello Lectures in Data Science were established in 2020 to keep his memory alive among the new generation of students.