The cycle of observation, hypothesis formulation, experimentation, and falsification that has driven scientific and technical progress is lately becoming automated in all its separate components. However, integration between these automated components is lacking. Theories are not placed in the same formal context as the (coded) protocols that are supposed to test them: neither description knows about the other, although they both aim to describe the same process.

We develop integrated descriptions from which we can extract both the model of a phenomenon (for possibly automated mathematical analysis), and the steps carried out to test it (for automated execution by lab equipment). This is essential if we want to carry out automated model synthesis, falsification, and inference, by taking into account uncertainties in both the model structure and in the equipment tolerances that may jointly affect the results of experiments.

Luca is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and ACM Fellow, and was awarded the Dahl-Nygaard Prize in 2007. He is a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford. Prior to that, he has worked at Bells Labs, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Microsoft Research Cambridge. He obtained his M.S. University of Pisa and his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh.

His research spans object-oriented foundations, type systems, module systems, distributed programming, spatial logics, semi-structured data, databases, computer architectures, and more recently, molecular programming and semantics, systems biology, biological models, and natural computability.