| Nicola Leone | |
| Birth Date: | 28 February 1963 |
| Birth Place: | Diamante, Italy |
| Nationality: | Italian |
| Fields: | Artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning, and database theory |
| Workplaces: | University of Calabria TU Wien |
| Alma Mater: | University of Calabria |
| Awards: |
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Nicola Leone is an Italian computer scientist who works in the areas of artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning, and database theory.[1] Leone is currently the rector of the University of Calabria and a professor of Computer Science.[2] [3] Previously, he was a professor of Database Systems at the TU Wien.[4]
Leone has published more than 250 scientific articles in the areas of artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning, and database theory.[5]
In the area of artificial intelligence and knowledge representation and reasoning, he is best known for his influential early work on answer set programming (ASP)and for the development of DLV, a pioneering system for knowledge representation and reasoning, which was the very first successful attempt to fully support disjunction in the datalog language, achieving the possibility to compute problems of high complexity, up to NP
NP
To the field of database theory he mainly contributed through the invention of hypertree decomposition, a framework for obtaining tractable structural classes of conjunctive queries, and a generalisation of the notion of tree decomposition from graph theory. This work has also had substantial impact in artificial intelligence, since it is known that the problem of evaluating conjunctive queries on relational databases is equivalent to the constraint satisfaction problem[6]