The main areas of current research in the Department are: Algorithms and Data Structures, Computer architecture, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Databases and Information Retrieval, Computational Mathematics, Programming Languages, Software Methodology and Engineering. The research activity of the Department was evaluated in 1999 by an international team of reviewers: the evaluation exercise and its result are described at URL http://www.di.unipi.it/Evaluation. The members of the Department have a remarkable scientific production at international level: the 1999 issue of the Annual Research Report listed over 400 ``external'' publications from 1997 to 1999. The Department is involved either as partner or as coordinator in many national and international projects. The Department also carries out research programs in cooperation with several computer companies on medium and long term research themes.
The group involved in this proposal includes Andrea Corradini, Fabio Gadducci and Ugo Montanari as key researchers, and additionally Paolo Baldan and Roberto Bruni. The group has a strong background in the areas of algebraic and co-algebraic specification, semantics of concurrency, coordination, graph transformation systems, mobile and higher order concurrency, Tile Logic. The group is involved in several national and European projects.