Mr. Roberto Cencioni is a 1974 graduate from the University of Rome. He joined the European Commission in 1977 and worked initially on a large-scale machine translation project. He then managed several teams developing distributed office and communication systems until the early 1990s, when he was entrusted with the co-ordination of R&D programmes in the area of speech and language technologies. Mr. Cencioni heads the unit entrusted with R&D activities in the area of digital content, interactive media and knowledge technologies since January 2003.