Since 1988 at IRST, Trento; currently FBK-irst Senior Fellow.

Director of ITC-IRST, Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, Trento, Italy (1997-2001).
Founder and head of the Communication and Cognitive Technologies Division 1993-2002; founder and head of the Natural Language Processing group since 1988.
Research activity in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, intelligent user interfaces, cognitive technologies, knowledge-based systems.

Presently, Coordinator of a FIRB Italy-Israel project and a collaboration project between ITC-irst and University of Haifa.  
Expert appointed by the Italian Minister for Research and University in the European Commission ICT committee.

Chair of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (1992-1994).
President of the Associazione Italiana per l'Intelligenza Artificiale (1992-1993 and 1994-1995).
President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (1996).
ECCAI Fellow (in the first lot of nominees, 1999) and AAAI Fellow (2006).

Author of two hundred published scientific papers, about one half in refereed journals and books and one half in refereed conference proceedings, and author or editor of twelve volumes (nine international).

Invited speaker at nearly seventy international conferences and workshops. Among these at the Tenth European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vienna 1992, at IJCAI-99, the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Stockholm 1999 and at the College de France, Paris, 1994, and the Institution of Electrical Engineers, London, 1995. Participant or coordinator at over 20 panels.

Chair of a dozen conferences or workshops, including: Co-chair of the NATO Workshop on Computational Theories of Communication - Castel Ivano (1990), co-chair of ANLP-92, Third Applied Natural Language Processing Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (1992), co-chair of the Third International Workshop on Natural Language Generation (1992), General Chair of AH-2000 International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia, (2000), Program Co-chair of INTETAIN-2005 International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment.
Member of the Advisory Committee of IJCAI-95, Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Montreal 1995 and of the Program Committees of over one hundred international conferences and workshops.

Associate editor of Applied Artificial Intelligence, member of the Advisory Board of Cognitive Science Quarterly, member of the editorial board of Artificial Intelligence, Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (Intelligent User Interfaces Area), Artificial Intelligence Review, Informatica: An International Journal of Computing and Informatics, Information Technology and Tourism. Formerly member of the editorial board of Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Natural Language Engineering. Member of the Editorial Review Board of Readings in Intelligent User Interfaces Morgan Kaufmann, Menlo Park, Ca., 1997. Advisory Board member of the Book Series on Cognitive Technologies, Springer Verlag (2002-). Editorial Board Member of AAAI Press, established by The American Association for AI and MIT Press (2005-2007).
Scientific Director of the 'Summer School on Temporal Reasoning', (1992), of the 'School on Natural Language Processing and Multilingualism' (1993), of the 'School on Spatial Reasoning' (1995) at the Istituto Mitteleuropeo di Cultura, Bolzano, Lecture Series in Cognitive Science: Metaphor and Analogy (1997).

Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of DFKI, the German Research Institute for AI, (2004-2006), of Germany's COLLATE Project.
Member of the Board of Governors of the University of Haifa.
Player of a key role in the launch of several IRST projects funded by European research programs. Under his tenure as director, 26 projects and contracts in the Fifth Framework Programme with IRST participation were accepted, out of 55 proposals.

Lecturer at several universities (Roma La Sapienza, Pavia, Pisa, Siena, Sissa Trieste, Trento) and international schools (Wilem Mathesius Courses, Charles University, Praha). Member of Executive Board of International Graduate School on ICT, University of Trento.

Until 1987 with the Italian National Council for Research (CNR), Rome, where he was responsible of the CNR-Strategic Project on Artificial Intelligence.

Recent awarded papers:

• James Chen Award for the Best Paper published in 2007 in UMUAI.O. Stock, M. Zancanaro, P. Busetta, C. Callaway, A. Krüger, M. Kruppa, T. Kuflik, E. Not and C. Rocchi ‘Adaptive, Intelligent Presentation of Information for the Museum Visitor in PEACH’ User Modelling and User-Adapted Interaction, Vol 17, n.3, pp. 257-304, 2007.
• CHI “Best Paper Honorable Mention” O. Stock, M. Zancanaro, C. Koren, C. Rocchi, Z. Eisikovits, D. Goren-bar, T. Weiss, ‘A Co-Located Interface for Narration to Support Reconciliation in a Conflict:  Initial Results from Jewish and Palestinian Youth’ Proceedings of CHI 2008, 26th Computer-Human Interaction Conference, Firenze, 2008.