Alfonso Urso received the Laurea degree in electronic engineering (Summa cum Laude), and the Ph.D. degree in systems engineering from the University of Palermo, Italy, in 1992 and 1997, respectively. In 1998, he was with the Department of Computer and Control Engineering, University of Palermo, as Research Associate. In 2000, he joined the High-Performance Computing and Networking Institute of the Italian National Research Council (ICAR-CNR), where he is currently a Researcher in systems and computer engineering. In 2006 he has been Visiting Researcher at University of Konstanz, Germany. From 2007 to 2015 he was the coordinator of the research group “Intelligent Data Analysis for Bioinformatics” of the Italian National Research Council. Since January 2016 he is Head of the Palermo branch of the High-Performance Computing and Networking Institute of the Italian National Research Council. Since 2001 he has been Lecturer at the University of Palermo where he teaches Computer Networks Security at the Faculty of Computer Science. His research interests are in the area of machine learning, soft computing, and applications to bioinformatics. Dr. Urso is a member of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers), and of the Italian Bioinformatics Society (BITS).