Alessandro Berni is a scientific specialist at the NATO Undersea Research Centre, working on the application of information and communication technologies to a broad range of maritime security problems.

Between 1987 and 1993, at the University of Genoa, he had a major role in the development of IUnet, the first wide area network in Italy to offer Internet access to nonacademic entities, contributing to the activation of country code top-level domains (CCTLD) for Italy (.IT) and Malta (.MT).

In 1994, he co-founded ITnet S.p.A., the first Internet service provider focused on the Italian corporate market, where he worked as business developer and network architect until 1999. During that period, he was involved with the activation of the CCTLD for the Vatican (.VA).

In 2000, he moved to the NATO Undersea Research Centre, first as the Internet manager, then as Deputy Head of the Communications and Information Systems Department, and, more recently, as a scientific specialist working on maritime security projects.

His research interests include wireless networking, Internet architectures, delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN), computer security, modeling, and simulation. In recent years, his focus has been on the use of sensor networks for surveillance and environmental monitoring and on the interfacing of underwater networks, based on acoustic communications, with “traditional” wireless networks based on the Internet protocol.

Alessandro holds a master’s degree in electronic engineering from the University of Genoa, and is a PRINCE2 practitioner. He is the author of several technical reports, conference papers, and journal articles, in addition to being a regular contributor to Computing Reviews.

He is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a member of the IEEE, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Italian Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC).