Giuseppe La Rocca

Dr. Giuseppe La Rocca

Dr. Giuseppe La Rocca was born in Catania (Italy) in January 1975.

He graduated in Software Engineering of the University of Catania in 2003 with a thesis on the development of a WLAN location based service based on 802.11b standard to track users within theatres and visaulize metadata contents based on their geographical locations.

Since 2004 he joined the division of Catania of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) as a scientific collaborator and started to collaborate in several European and regional Grid projects co-funded by the European Community in the context of the 6th and 7th Framework Programme such as: EGEE (www.eu-egee.org), BioinfoGRID (www.bioinfogrid.eu), EUMedGrid (www2.eumedgrid.eu), EUChinaGrid (www.euchinagrid.org), LIBI (http://www.libi.it), COMETA (www.consorzio-cometa.it) and EGEE-III projects.

In these projects his main activity was to foster the training of new users and scientific communities and provide them first line of support to grid-enable scientific applications in a production e-Infrastructure and speed up the creation of results of particular relevance. During these years he supported several applications, coming from different scientific domains such us: Astro-Particles Physics, Earth Science Communities and Life Science. Among them, he supported biologists involved in the EUChinaGrid project interested to use the distributed computational resources of the EUChinaGrid infrastructure to reconstruct the 3D structure of Never Born Proteins (NVP), he helped bioinformaticians of CNR ITB of Bari (www.itb.cnr.it), involved in the LIBI project, to perform phylogenetic analyses based on a parallel version of MrBayes (mrbayes.csit.fsu.edu) on a large scale. During his experience with the BioinfoGRID project he set up a grid infrastructure to run BLAST (blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi). Working as unfunded of the EUMedGrid project he supported the deployment of CODESA-3D (www.crs4.it/EIS/WRMProject.html), a three-dimensional model for flow and solute transport in variably saturated porous media on unstructured domains and the archaeological community interested to investigate the pale climate situation in the Mediterranean area in the XVIII century B.C. using meteorological modelling software. In the context of the COMETA project, he supported bioinformatics community interested at developing a grid service for compression-based classification of biological sequences and structures (www.math.unipa.it/~raffaele/kolmogorov/).

Starting from 2006 he is the responsible for Grid deployment of the ASTRA project (www.astraproject.org). During this collaboration the following activities have been conducted: 1.) a distributed grid infrastructure in order to support on large scale the sound reconstruction of ancient instruments (not existing anymore) by means of the Physical Modeling Synthesis technique has been set up; 2.) a web service interface, based on the GENIUS Grid portal (https://genius.ct.infn.it) powered by EnginFrame (http://nice-software.com/web/nice/products/enginframe), to permit musicians, historians and no expert users to perform the sound reconstruction of ancient instruments and perform live demos, for dissemination purposes has been set up.

Since the 2004 he started to collaborate with NICE Srl (www.nice-italy.com/web/nice/home), a SME, developing web-based services on board of the GENIUS Grid portal and enhanced the EnginFrame Java/XML framework with the support to robot certificate and implementing the User Tracking System. He is author of 25 research papers reviewed by some International Conferences, including a book chapter in the "Handbook of Research on Computational Grid Technologies for Life Sciences, Biomedicine and Healthcare", in Cannataro Ed. and a book chapter in the "Handbook of Research on Technologies and Cultural Heritage: Applications and Environments" (in press).