Biography

There's one year that marks the beginning of everything: 1982. Italy won the World Cup in Spain, Paolo Rossi became a legend, and I, in my already overflowing bedroom filled with skis, tennis rackets, balls, and trekking boots, why did staying still ever seem like an option, opened the box of a Commodore 64. While the country celebrated with parades of cars painted in the tricolour, I discovered BASIC. Both things, I must admit, thrilled me equally.

From then on, my path followed a logic that was almost inevitable. At the Istituto Lorenzo Cobianchi I earned my diploma in Electrical Engineering, then specialized further with a post-diploma qualification as Microprocessor-Based Systems and Telecommunications Local Area Networks Designer—a title so long it took up half the certificate by itself. In the labs I learned Pascal, Fortran, and then C, and I realized this wasn't just a passing phase: it was the thread running through everything that came after.

What came next took turns I hadn't foreseen. Programmer in C++ and Clipper, technical support for well-known audio and video brands, and then, twist of fate, the confectionery industry. Now, if my surname is Ferrero, ending up working in the world of sweets has all the air of destiny written in the stars. Let it be clear that I'm not a relative of the famous brand, but this didn't stop colleagues, acquaintances, and even some customers from teasing me for years with remarks that, I admit, I learned to anticipate before they even opened their mouths. "So, will you take us shopping for Rocher chocolate?" Every. Single. Time.

Jokes aside, that season was my real training ground. Superficially distant from IT, it taught me teamwork, safety culture, and responsibility on an industrial scale. And in the end, it brought me back to my world through the management of warehouse IT systems. Meanwhile, my mind, unassailable, kept updating itself on PHP, Python, graphics, and video, as if afraid of getting bored.

Then there's another chapter close to my heart: that of the trainer. Starting in 2006, I began preparing courses for the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), but that was only the first step. Over time, the activity expanded: IT courses on various topics for training agencies and private clients, always with the same underlying belief—that technology should serve people, not the reverse. From this long experience also emerged a book: "European Computer Licence: Practical Strategies and Exercises to Easily Pass the ECDL Exam," published by Bruno Editore—an attempt to make accessible what too often hides behind unnecessarily hostile language. Right up until the last year, when training naturally shifted toward Artificial Intelligence, which had meanwhile become my primary field of study.

Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, my territory, is another thread running through this entire journey. I've always had a visceral attachment to these mountains, lakes, and community—a kind of love that's hard to explain to those who don't share it, but instantly recognizable to those who do. When I got the tools to do so, it was almost obvious I'd put them at its service. First with a portal dedicated to local hiking, then, from 2012 onward, co-founding verbanianotizie.it, which today counts over two million visitors. And alongside this, in silence, about twenty websites created free of charge for local associations: sports clubs, services for seniors, for children, for women in difficulty. I'm not telling you this for boastfulness, but because it's part of who I am, and because I believe technology, when it meets a real community, can do things that no algorithm can fully measure.

Then, after closing the long chapter at a multinational, came Artificial Intelligence. Not to chase a trend—because in this field trends move fast—but out of genuine intellectual need. Over the last two years I've studied this technology trying to go beyond background noise and aggressive marketing, which too often poisons it with unrealistic promises. I felt the need to tell the real story of AI: that made up of biases, ethical questions, real potentialities but also precise and concrete limitations. First came the practical guide "Practical Guide to Using Artificial Intelligences," written together with my friend Matteo Baccan. Then, almost by force of gravity, aitalk.it: not a project with a business plan, but a ship's log. A place to filter out the noise and offer some clarity to those who truly want to understand, without being dazzled by spotlights.

The analyses published here have, with pleasure and a certain surprise, attracted the attention of several sector publications: from Codemotion to Tech360, all the way to Mokabyte.

"Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans," John Lennon once said, and he was right then as he is now. The future cannot be planned, and honestly that's the part I find most interesting. I don't know which trajectory this path will take, but I'm genuinely curious to discover it. If you found something here that made you think, sparked a question, or even raised an eyebrow, write to me. Perhaps we'll discover that a piece of that trajectory coincides with mine for at least a stretch.

Welcome to aitalk.it: here we don't try to sell the future. We try to take it apart, piece by piece.