I moved to the UK from Italy back in 1996. I say “I moved”, but all expats will know you don’t really “move”: you go to a place for some reason, then you stay a bit, then you stay another bit, and then you’ve been there for too long, and you don’t go back.

Before 1996 I was working as a Database Administrator in a private school in Bari, my hometown. This was only a façade though, as really I was working part time as a research assistant in the Intelligent Interfaces Lab of the Department of Informatics, at the University of Bari. I need to spend two words, here, and I might get a bit emotional, so you’ve been warned. I am extremely proud of my alma mater, of course, we all are. I think it has been an excellent training for my academic life, and the main reason for this is that I was immensely fortunate to have as project supervisor, and then mentor, and then collaborator, and most of all dear friend, an exceptional human being. Many things can be said about Fiorella de Rosis, of her courage in life and in death. But a number of generations of researchers will agree that the most valuable inheritance she passed on to us all is our own job: the realisation that academia is an exciting place to be, and research is a wonderful, crazy, painful, passionate, exhilarating enterprise, something I for one would have never considered before.

In summer 1995, without a care in the world, I came over for a visit to my other half, busy with a PhD in Warwick, and managed to get myself caught in an interview for a research post on an EPSRC grant (all of which sounded very exoteric to me). So, in January 1996, I moved to Edinburgh, to work with Alison Cawsey in the (then) Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering of Heriot-Watt University. Alison’s sense of humour, gentleness, depth, and profound integrity, will always be part of me, as well as the serenity with which she shared the last days of her life.

I joined the Department of Computer Science of the University of Liverpool in October 1998.

The rest you know, or can figure out.