Oliviero Stock is honorary member of AIXIA

The  Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence has bestowed the title of Honorary Member on Oliviero Stock, former director of the Institute for Scientific and Technological Research  (IRST) of the Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC) and now senior fellow at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, as well as Fellow of prestigious international artificial intelligence associations such as EurAI (European Association for Artificial Intelligence), AAI (Association for the  Advancement of AI) and former member of the Scientific Council of DFKI, the German Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence, one of the largest AI research centers in the world.

A man of great culture and passion, Oliviero Stock was among the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence, standing out for a scientific vision aimed at tackling complex challenges that are capable of bringing concrete benefits to society and people, rather than chasing fads or easy results of the moment. – reads a note by AIxIA President Gianluigi Greco – Oliviero Stock has, in fact, authored foundational research in the field of computational linguistics, a field that has nowadays largely entered the center of public debate; he has made important contributions on issues related to human-computer interaction, advocating the idea that machines should understand people rather than forcing people to adapt to machines; and it has, likewise, given vigorous impetus to the use of intelligent systems in the context of cultural heritage enhancement, pioneering, already more than 20 years ago, interactive and multimodal guides that adapted to user tastes and preferences.

Alongside his research activities, Oliviero Stock has been able to support the international scientific community with intense and valuable service. He held the position of president of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1992-1993 and 1994-1995, immediately after Luigia Carlucci Aiello, its founder and first president. He was Chairman of EurAI (then called ECCAI) and President of ACL, the Association of Computational Linguistics. He has been a member of numerous editorial boards of the most important scientific journals in the field, author of more than 250 scientific publications, and has taught courses at numerous Italian (La Sapienza in Rome, Pavia, Pisa, Siena, Sissa Trieste, Trento) and international universities (Wilem Mathesius Courses, Charles University, Prague, Haifa). A considerable part of his ceaseless work was finally devoted to IRST (now Fondazione Bruno Kessler-FBK), an institute he directed from 1997 to 2001 and where he had founded the Natural Language Processing group and then the Cognitive and Communication Technologies Division.”

Gianluigi Greco also commented on the awarding of the important recognition with these words, “The title of Honorary Member that the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence reserved for Oliviero Stock is meant to be a thank you for his contribution to science and the international scientific community. We are proud to embrace Oliviero and thank him for his unwavering commitment to the development of Artificial Intelligence over a long and brilliant career. Huge is our esteem for him, huge is our appreciation for what he was able to do, for his intelligence and for his great moral depth. It is all our honor for this recognition, to have him – from now on – even closer in our journey.”
To retrace the academic and personal path of Oliviero Stock we offer an interview for FBK Magazine entitled “What is artificial intelligence?” at this link.