ROBERTO
DI COSMO, after obtaining a PhD in
Computer Science at the University of Pisa,
was associate professor for almost a decade at
Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and became
a Computer Science full professor at
University Paris Diderot in 1999. He is
currently on leave at Inria.
He
has been actively involved in research in
theoretical computing, specifically in
functional programming, parallel and
distributed programming, the semantics of
programming languages, type systems, rewriting
and linear logic. His main focus is now on the
new scientific problems posed by the general
adoption of Free Software, with a particular
focus on static analysis of large software
collections, that were at the core of the
european reseach project Mancoosi.
Following
the evolution of our society under the impact
of IT with great interest, he is a long term
Free Software advocate, contributing to its
adoption since 1998 with the best-seller
Hijacking the world, seminars, articles and
software. He created the Free Software
thematic group of Systematic in October 2007,
and since 2010 he is director of IRILL, a
research structure dedicated to Free and Open
Source Software quality. In 2016, he
co-founded and directs Software Heritage, an
initiative to build the universal archive of
all the source code publicly available.