Federico Cabitza, was born in Milan in 1974. He received a classical diploma from the Berchet Liceo (high school) where he was a student representative and managing editor of the school magazine for two years.

In 1993, he was choosen to represent Italy in Berlin, Germany during the fourth Contest for Young Scientist organized by the European Union.

In 2001, he received a master degree in computer engineering from the Politecnico of Milan with his thesis focusing on knowledge engineering, decision support systems and artificial intelligence.

In 2000, during his university studies, he became an entrepeneur starting his own company, which later became a limited company (i.e., SRL), called SVANA (which means sound in Sanskrit). SVANA specialized in sound engineering and recordings made under unusual enviromental conditions (e.g., churches, castles, country seats).

In March 2001, he worked for a Milan-based ICT firm of the TC Sistema Group (listed on the Stock Exchange from 2000 to 2004 - TCS.MI) as a computer consultant. After the first assignments of content management and application development, he was officially hired since September 2001 with an open-ended contract (First level. - CCNL Commercio) to deal with product certification and quality management of logistic processes. Subsequently, he became responsible for these processes. Furthermore in 2001, he attended two courses organized by the Istituto Marchio Qualità (IMQ) where he acquired in-depth knowledge of ISO9000 and Vision2000 compliant Quality Management Systems.

In July, 2002, he was hired by another company of the TC Sistema Group, the Inforstation srl, as project manager and person responsible for the whole company information system. At Infostation, he was coordinator of a unit of four software analysts and developers under the technical direction. In that period he was involved in the design of business processes, in the monitoring of the quality of the service provided and in the implementation of information systems which are supportive to management control.

In November 2003, he won a scholarship to attend the Information Science PhD course at the Computer Science Department (DISCo http://www.disco.unimib.it ) of the University of Milano-Bicocca.

During the doctorate period, he collaborated with Prof. Carla Simone and specialized in the study and analysis of work practices and in the design of computer-based support to teamwork and human resurce coordination, either in the intra-organizational or distributed domain, by means of innovative and context-aware inference technologies. Since 2004, he has had an intense teaching activity at the university on decision support systems, knowledge management and sharing and corporate communication technologies.

From 2004 to 2006, he carried out intense research activity on the information flows and tools employed at the Manzoni Hospital of Lecco, more specifically in the Internal Medicine and Neonatology wards there. The results and outcomes of this research have been reported to the reference international community of CSCW field (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) with several contributions and talks to international conferences.

In September 2005, he stipulated an agreement for a long-term project as a young researcher with functions of project management within the research activities of the Italian Ministry funded project 'eG4M' (eGovernment for the Mediterranean Countries). Within the eG4M project, for six months he collaborated closely with the project coordinator, prof. Prof. Carlo Batini, who is one the main experts on data quality and computer-based information systems. With Batini, he was interested in methodologies for the assessment, improvement and management of data quality, especially within the domain of unstructured information resources, business process quality, and in the readiness of organizations to process reeingineering and adoption of quality improvement programs. In May 2006, he decided to dedicate his time entirely to computer-based support for medical practice and resigned from the eG4M project, in which he still occasionally works as a consultant.

After receiving the PhD degree with a thesis on computational models supportive to corporate work in documental domains (the reference case study was on
the patient record model of the Lombardy Region), in December 2006, he won a two-year fellowship at DISCo to continue the development and testing of the reference architecture designed during the doctorate. The main goals of his current research are the integration inside the clinical record of specific functionalities supportive to clinical practice (e.g., clinical pathways), to medical knowledge and responsibility sharing within the distributed care domain and the analysis and assessment of the impact of such applications in the caring and medical domain.