Fabio Paternò is Research Director at C.N.R.-ISTI in Pisa where he founded and leads the Laboratory on Human Interfaces in Information Systems.

His research activity has mainly been carried out in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field, with the goal to introduce computational support to improve usability, accessibility, and user experience for all in the various possible contexts of use by proposing relevant languages, models, design spaces, tools, and applications. For this purpose, he has continuously led for several years numerous interdisciplinary international or national projects. In his research work he has always aimed at deepening and intertwining both theoretical and practical innovative aspects, with attention to possible social implications. His main current research interests are in the areas of Interactive Smart Spaces, Accessibility, End-User Development, Human-centered Artificial Intelligence

He has published about three hundred papers in refereed international conferences or journals.

He has been the scientific coordinator of several EU projects ( MEFISTO, GUITARE, EUD-Net, CAMELEON, OPEN, PETAL), and one of the main investigators in several others (such as ADVISES, MAUSE, SIMILAR, SERVFACE, SERENOA, SMARCOS, PersonAAL , WADCHER). He is currently the coordinator of the National Research Project (PRIN) EMPATHY , the CNR Project SERENI and the project on Automatic Accessibility Validation funded by the PNRR

He was the chair of the first International Workshop on Design, Specification, Verification of Interactive Systems. He has been a member of the Programme Committee of the main international HCI conferences, including Papers Co-Chair of the ACM CHI 2000 conference , IFIP INTERACT 2003 and IFIP INTERACT 2005. He chaired or co-chaired various other events including Mobile HCI 2002 , ACM EICS 2011 conference, Ambient Intelligence 2012, ACM EICS 2014 Conference , Mobile HCI 2016, IS-EUD 2017, MUM 2019 and co-chair of ACM Intelligent User Interfaces 2020

He represents Italy in the IFIP Technical Committee 13 on Human Computer Interaction, and has been the chair of IFIP WG 2.7/13.4 on User Interface Engineering and a member of WG 13.2 and WG 13.3, and chaired the ACM SIGCHI Italy (from 2000 to 2004). He was appointed ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2009, was awarded the IFIP TC13 Pioneer in Human-Computer Interaction in 2014, ACM Distinguished Speaker in 2015, and IFIP Fellow in 2020. In 2021 he has been elected into the SIGCHI Academy

He has taught in various universities in Italy and abroad, given tutorials in several international conferences and talks in various research centers, currently teaches user interface design and usability evaluation at University of Pisa.

He supervised the work of many young researchers (master, PhD, and post-doc students) from various countries, more than twenty have become full-time professors or researchers in various universities and research centers throughout Europe. He has also been member of the PhD juries for universities for more than 30 PhDs in a dozen or so different nations.

He has been reviewer for about twenty research funding agencies spread all over the world.

His research work has also been funded by various companies. He has been co-chair of the W3C Working Group on Model-based User Interfaces