Paolo was born in Italy in 1961 and moved to the US with his family at age 16.
He received a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Penn State in 1990. He taught
undergraduate physics at Carleton College and St Olaf College, Minnesota, while
consulting and researching in wind turbine aerodynamics. He then worked for a
wearable computer company in Minnesota and continued working in hardware R&D at
Philips Research Laboratories in the UK until 2001. He was then a research group
leader at the MIT Media Lab Europe in Dublin. In 2003 he joined the Department
of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political
Science (UK), with which he retains an affiliation as a Senior Visiting Research
Fellow. In 2012 He also joined the Computer Science Department at the University
of Hertfordshire (UK), with which he retains an affiliation as Visiting Research
Fellow. More recently, he has worked as an R&D consultant for the Sardex
complementary currency 2016-19.
In social science, Paolo is interested in studying social, economic, monetary,
and political theory and how they apply to bottom-up socio-economic phenomena
such as complementary currencies. His preferred applied field in social science
is the role of collaborative finance tools such as mutual credit and
obligation-clearing in (the political economy of) sustainable development.
In Computer Science Paolo has worked on biocomputing and algebraic automata
theory. He is very interested, although far from an expert, in Abstract State
Machines as a mathematical specification and modelling methodology for software
engineering.
In physics and mathematics Paolo is interested in the study of symmetries,
non-linear dynamical systems, abstract algebra (esp. group theory), and
differential geometry.