Stefano Ceri is professor at the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione (DEI), Politecnico di Milano; he was a visiting professor at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University between 1983 and 1991. He is the Director of Alta Scuola Politecnica (ASP), a school of excellence emphasizing innovation and multidisciplinarity, for master-level students of Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino. He is author of more than 300 articles on International Journals and Conference Proceedings and of 11 international books, with an H-index 56. He is co-inventor of WebML, a model for the conceptual design of Web applications (US Patent 6,591,271, July 2003), and co-founder in 2001 of Web Models, a spinoff company of Politecnico di Milano which commercializes WebML by means of the product WebRatio. He is the recipient of the ERC IDEAS Grant “Search Computing” (SeCo), a multi-disciplinary project providing the abstractions, foundations, methods, and tools required to give answer to complex search queries. The project spans from Nov. 1, 2008 to Oct. 31, 2013; the major results include a series of three books with Springer-Verlag, numerous articles and demos, and a recently awarded patent.