Piergiorgio Palla received a Laurea (M.Sc.) degree in electronic engineering from the University of Cagliari in Sardinia, where he worked on a thesis about the impact of different encoding schemes of amino acid sequences on the performance of neural network-based predictors. His studies on machine learning brought him to the Bioinformatics service group at CRS4 where he worked until December 2008.Currently he is part of the Cheminformatics Group at CRS4, where he works developing QSAR and QSPR models to predict biological activity and properties of chemical compounds. His current professional interests are mainly in machine learning and in the study of the technologies and protocols needed to design converged switched networks.