Marco Pennacchiotti	Research Scientist Yahoo! Labs 701 First Avenue Sunnyvale, CA 94089
e-mail: pennac_AT_yahoo-inc.com phone: +1 408 349 8786 fax: +1 448 8599

I support:

Short bio

I am a research scientist at Yahoo! Labs, since December 2008, where I do research on social media and data mining with discrete success. But, as most scientists, I am a humble person. Therefore you should conclude that I am very successful, and that I wrote (or will write) several useless books.

Before Yahoo!, I was an associate researcher at the Computational Linguistic Department of Saarland University (Germany), where I successfully failed to learn German, despite more than a year of close contact with serious and less serious German folks.

I received my PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" (ART group) in May 2007 with a dissertation on "Recognizing Textual Entailment: Methods and Resources". I vaguely remember the topic of my thesis, mostly during nightmares. In fact, my best memory of my PhD period is having lunch on the grass with my friend Joe, talking about everything but Artificial Intelligence.

I graduated in Computer Science Engineering in May 2003 with a thesis on Extraction and Classification of Verb Patterns. That was probably the last moment of my career in which I was still in time to change the course of my life, and choose something slightly more serious. My brightest memory of that period is my paper airplane crossing the whole classroom of 500+ people, and hitting the poor math professor between the chalk and his hand. I am still pretty proud of that precise airplane flight. Unfortunately, I had soon to deal with the angry guys in the first row, once the professor left the room mumbling aloud.

I am half-Italian, half-Swiss; this fact being completely uninteresting to the reader, but of primal importance for the writer. Other than my life being characterized by the half-half syndrome (i.e. permanent insatisfaction), I am also very proud of both my origins. I think I got the best from both sides: punctuality from the Italian side, and teutonic imagination from the Swiss side. Truth is, I am a multicolored person. In 1995 I was still doing my classical studies and thinking that I would have been a great ethologist in the future. In the meantime I joined Greenpeace, which gave me the lucky opportunity to put my foot into the Fontana di Trevi holding a gigantic paper fish. Afterwards I mostly dedicate my life to masochistic activities such as running marathons, paragliding, snowboarding, playing in a kind of band, etc etc.

Honestly, I am still in doubt that I will spend the rest of my life as a scientist, with all the opportunities that life can offer to a humble person like me. I may open an agriturismo at some point, or a grattacheccha kiosk on the shores of the Saar river, though my lifetime ambition is really to learn to play the piano like this.