SOMALVICO MARCO
In Memoriam
Marco Somalvico (October 10, 1941 - November 17, 2002).
Marco Somalvico suddenly passed away on November 17, 2002. He was 61 years old. Marco graduated from Politecnico di Milano where, in 1980, he became full professor of Artificial Intelligence.
Marco has been one of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Italy. In 1973 he founded the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (AIRLab) at Politecnico di Milano with the goal of supporting the research activities in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, and Machine Perception. In 1998 he was awarded with the international prize Joseph Engelberger Robotics Award. Marco has been the first rector’s delegate for the support of disabilities at Politecnico di Milano, and he also devoted part of his research to the technologies supporting disabilities. In 1987, he organized in Milan the largest and most prestigious conference on Artificial Intelligence, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). He has been among the founders of the Italian Society of Industrial Robotics (SIRI) in 1975 and of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA) in 1988.
Marco mentored several generations of students amongst whom many became professors and researchers. His research focused on different areas, such as the methods for the automatic resolution of problems, natural language processing, computer vision, multiagent systems, virtual museums, and the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. He was a visionary researcher and often able to anticipate future research paths. He strongly believed that interdisciplinarity plays an essential role in science, and that the human sciences and the engineering sciences need to interact.
Marco, already from the beginning of his career, merged together different elements in a very original way. Educated at Politecnico di Milano, he then spent three years at Stanford University. He came from Como where he was a honor student in a Catholic school, but then in the USA he met the anarchy of the Californian counterculture in the 1970’s. This clash was not traumatic; rather he liked to recollect how these two different aspects were both present in his life and how, when he landed in California, he embraced the new style of life with enthusiasm, without forgetting his old values.
At Stanford University, he worked with John MaCarthy, one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence, and his collaborators. From this experience in the USA – to which he referred to as a “machine for time travels into the future” – he came back to Italy with innovative competencies and plenty of ideas, ready to play a leading role in Artificial Intelligence. Later, he kept repeating how important was to spend some time abroad as a way to gain as much as possible from this experience in order to bring back home new professional competencies and new styles of life.
In the last years of his life, Marco became very fond of philosophy that, back when he was a student, was one of his favourite topics. Philosophy was even one of the possible choices he considered when he was thinking of his university studies. He then took a different path, but always remained very interested in it. He didn’t read many books of philosophy nor studied it, but he was interested in the actual essence of philosophy as an activity capable of overcoming the commonsensic knowledge and reaching deeper explanations.
Every person who got in contact with Marco can remember his deep originality, his dashing nature, and his enthusiasm toward knowledge, together with a deep humanity and a rare capacity to understand people.