Gesualdo Le Moli (Asmara, Eritrea 1940 – Milan 2025), after earning his degree in Electronic Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in 1963, began his scientific research in the field of electronics at the laboratory of the Institute of Electrical Engineering and Electronics. His early experimental work focused on impedance measurement techniques using variable-gain amplifiers.

In the following years, he devoted himself to the study of marine electric fields as part of the international SACOI project, the submarine power cable that would later connect the electrical grids of Sardinia and Corsica with that of mainland Italy. In this context, together with G. Cottafava, he developed pioneering techniques for representing electric fields in computer memory and printing them through an automatic plotter. Their paper Automatic contour maps, published in 1969 in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), gained wide international recognition.

Between 1974 and 1976, while serving as Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Le Moli shifted his scientific focus from electrical engineering to information technologies — computer science, telecommunications, and telematics. During those years, the European Informatics Network was taking shape, the first network designed to interconnect the computers of European research centres through the new packet-switching technique, which had been tested only a few years earlier in the United States with the ARPANET university network, the precursor of the Internet.

Within this long-term European endeavour, Le Moli played a significant role as representative of both the Politecnico di Milano and the Italian government. For the former, he directed the Centro Rete Europea di Informatica (CREI) from 1973 to 1992; for the latter, he was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Intergovernmental Bureau of Informatics (IBI). In 1973, he was also designated as the Italian member of the committee within the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) responsible for data network technology and standardization.

In 1976, he was appointed Full Professor by the University of Catania, where he directed the Institute of Electrical Engineering until 1979, when he returned to the Politecnico di Milano to take up the Chair of Electrical Engineering.

He again represented the Italian government on the management board of the ESPRIT (European Strategic Programme for Research in Information Technology) project during the period 1983–1988. He also founded the Italian Consortium for Open System Interconnection (COSI), aimed at keeping companies and professionals in the telematics sector informed about the rapidly evolving international standards.

Convinced of the importance of disseminating knowledge of computer networking technologies, he delivered numerous lectures and specialized courses and authored several publications, including the textbook Telematica: architetture, protocolli e servizi (Telematics: Architectures, Protocols and Services). He also contributed to defining telematics strategies for the Italian public administration, offering his expertise to the Authority for Informatics in Public Administration (AIPA).

A sudden vascular accident gradually forced him to reduce his scientific, organizational, and teaching activities. The onset of illness prevented him from continuing several projects to which he had been deeply committed. Nevertheless, he turned adversity into an opportunity, devoting himself with determination and passion to research initiated by Prof. Marco Somalvico, focused on experimental evaluation of new rehabilitation methods and computer-based aids using artificial intelligence, designed for people with speech disabilities.

To this end, he experimented personally, in collaboration with the Institute of Psychology of the University of Milan, with the Bliss method, which integrated into communication a repertoire of icons displayed on a screen. His final technical report, addressed to physiotherapists and rehabilitation specialists, offered a critical assessment of the effectiveness of this computer-assisted communication aid.