Agostino CORTESI

Agostino Cortesi (1963) received a PhD degree in Applied Mathematics and Informatics from the University of Padova in 1992. He spent a post-doc at Brown University, under the supervision of Pascal van Hentenryck, and then he moved to Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, where he’s full professor in Computer Science since 2002.

He has held the position of visiting professor at several universities and research centers, including University of Illinois, Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris, Ecole Polytechnique Palaiseau, IBM T.J.Watson Research Center and University of Calcutta.

At the Ca’ Foscari University, he served for eight years as Vice-Rector, taking care of quality assessment and institutional affairs. He also served as Dean of the Computer Science programs, as Chair of the Department of Computer Science, as Dean of the School of Social and Public Sciences, as Coordinator of the Data Monitoring Board, as President of the International Research Center on Economy of Tourism, and of Head of the PhD program in Computer Science. Currently he serves as delegate of the Rector for Research Quality Assessment.

At national level, he held the position of Vice-President of GRIN, taking care of defining new didactic systems of bachelor and master's degree programs in computer science, and he’s currently member of the Board of Directors of CINI.

His main research interests concern software engineering and static analysis techniques, with particular emphasis on security applications. In particular, he has mainly contributed to the theoretical design and experimental evaluation of abstract domains and abstract operators for the verification of behavioral properties of software systems within the Abstract Interpretation framework. He has also investigated the impact of semantics-based approaches in different applicative scenarios (watermarking, relational databases, etc.). Finally, he has contributed to projects investigating the twinning of ICT and different social and economic fields (from Tourism to E-Government to Social Sciences).

Agostino has published more than 200 papers in high level international journals (including ACM TOPLAS, ACM TOSEM, IEEE TSE, IEEE RAL, TCS, SCP, ESWA, SP&E) and proceedings of top international conferences (including POPL, PLDI, LICS, IROS, ICALP, ECOOP, TACAS, SAS, VMCAI, SAC).

He serves as co-Editor in Chief of the book series "Services and Business Process Reengineering" edited by Springer-Nature. He is member of the editorial board of the journal “Computer Languages”. He served as guest editor for special issues of “Science of Computer Programming”, “International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer” and “Computer Languages, Systems and Structures”. He co-edited for Springer twelve volumes on  “Applied Computation and Security Systems”.

He is member of the steering committee of the highly ranked international Conference on Verification, Model Checking and Abstract Interpretation, and he served as program committee chair/member of several international conferences, including ACM SAC, SAS, VMCAI, CSF, CISIM, ACSS and ICCIDE.

He held the position of Coordinator of the EU Horizon2020 "Families_Share" Project (1.600K euro), and of unit leader of the Horizon2020 "EQUAL-IST " Project (190K euro) and of the COST project "Eutypes". In partnership with Regione Veneto, he served as coordinator of CEVID - Centro Veneto di Innovazione Digitale per Cittadini, Imprese e Pubblica Amministrazione (360K euro) and as unit-leader of several FSE projects (for more than 1.000K euro). He coordinated the MIUR-MAE Italy-India project 2017-20 "Formal Specification for Secured Software System", and  two FESR industrial projects, titled “ADMIN4D – Additive Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 as Innovation Driver” (150K euro) and “VIR2EM - Virtualization and Remotization for  Resilient and Efficient Manufacturing" (200K euro). He is currently the coordinator of the international collaboration project BRIDGE (250K euro), coordinator of the Venice unit of the Erasmus+ EcoDigify (86K euros) and  HEALTH-AI (50K) projects, and of the RIR SUPREME (150K euros) project.

At the Ca’ Foscari University Agostino holds the chairs of "Software Engineering" and "Software Correctness, Security and Reliability" in the Computer Science bachelor and master programs respectively, the chair of "Computer Networks and Information Systems" in the master program in Management, and the chair of "Data Programming" in the master program in Governance of Public Bodies.

With some colleagues and post-doctoral collaborators he founded Factors, a Ca' Foscari spin-off focused on the verification of robotic systems. Factors  received the first prize of the Veneto SmartCup 2020 competition for the ICT category.

Here is a list of some of his former PhD scholars with their current affiliation: Chiara Braghin (Univ.Milano), Raju Halder (IIT Patna), Sukriti Bhattacharya (Univ.Luxemburg), Pietro Ferrara (Univ.Venice), Giulia Costantini (Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences), Matteo Zanioli (CIO Alpenite), Mohamed Abbadi (Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences), Souvick Das (Univ. Luxemburg), Mandira Roy (Ca'Foscari University).

Bibliometrics (December 2025):
number of citations: 2208 (Scopus), 4127 (google scholar)
h-index: 26 (scopus), 35 (google scholar)