I have always been interested in technology. As a teenager I was fascinated by the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. I had these space project pictures, as many as they could fit, on the walls of my room. Before the Apollo 11 moon landing, I was already studying engineering at the University of Pisa, Italy.

As I discovered FORTRAN, I turned my attention to programming and soon after I switched to computer science, the very first year a faculty of Computer Science (Scienze dell’Informazione) was established in Pisa. This was the first in Italy and I was one of the first graduates in February 1973. My diploma ended up hanging at the museum of science and technology in Milan, not for my merit, but because of the novelty of this new science.

It was a big deal for me at the time to write my thesis, on a project that established communication between an IBM mainframe and an HP computer, when computers did not communicate to each other yet. As a curiosity, at the time, documents were typed on mechanical typewriters; it was very unusual to see a thesis that was produced using a word processor and right-justified.

Most of the first graduates in computer science were immediately picked up by research centers, or by IBM, by far the biggest IT company at the time. I wanted to continue in research and I was offered a position at the National Research Council in Pisa. I also had applied to IBM, but I told them that I would join IBM only if they hired me for research at the IBM Scientific Center in Pisa, where one of the main project was research on computer networks.

I was hired there, and for several years I was the only graduate in Computer Science working with IBM in Pisa. In the next three and a half years I participated in two projects, precursors to the internet. When IBM hinted that their Center in Pisa would be closed, practically the only option, for me to continue in computer research, was to move to North America. The US embassy at the time was swamped by immigration requests, so I applied for, and was given, immigration to Canada. I became a Canadian citizen and was hired by IBM, the day before I left Italy, to work at their software development laboratory in Don Mills, Ontario, in 1978.

For the list of my technical experience and achievements, please see my technical biography below.

Although my experience has been mainly in computer networking and communication, I always enjoyed thinking about new ideas. Through my brother, a mechanical engineer, I had the fortune of becoming a friend of Corradino D’Ascanio, while I was still a university student. D’Ascanio had fought as a young airplane pilot in World War I, invented the Vespa in 1946, and developed the first working helicopter, at the same time of Sikorsky, a Russian inventor. In Italy, D’Ascanio is known as the inventor of the modern helicopter and a stamp was issued in his honor.

Later I met other innovators that had a positive influence on my thinking process, such as Edward De Bono, who coined the term “lateral thinking”, and Paul MacCready, the first person to build a human powered airplane, the Gossamer Albatross, which crossed the English channel.

As a child I briefly studied music and started playing piano. As a teenager I enjoyed every new Beatles song and learned how to play the guitar. However, I had difficulty reading music at a reasonable speed. So I started thinking about, and eventually developed a new music notation. Since the classic music notation was developed by Guido Monaco, a monk who was born 950 years before me in the same city, Arezzo, I felt confident that after so many centuries and with my knowledge of formal notation in computer languages, I could come up with a simpler and easier notation. Eventually, in the early 1980s, I published three books for children to learn how to play piano using my notation.

After many years of consulting work in computer networking, I started becoming more entrepreneurial. I started a company with a Toronto partner, involving point of sale terminals at the time of the first touch-screens appeared on the market.

After that, with my older brother, a mechanical engineer, we developed a water treadmill: an indoor pool for swimming against an electronically controlled water flow, so that the water moves at the speed of the swimmer. This was manufactured in Alabama.

We also invented a machine for washing clothes that can substitute the washer/dryer combination in homes. This uses very little water, soap and energy, and works at room temperature; we were rewarded for this design with a prize in an international competition.

I always enjoyed mathematical puzzles, astronomy and other technology related subjects.

More recently I published the solution to a few paradoxes, including the famous paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise that challenged many philosophers and mathematicians for millennia.

Currently I am developing several innovations related to the blockchain and distributed applications.

I often come up with new ideas, and I just applied for a new provisional patent.

I also enjoy working with my hands; As a child I was making things with hammer and nails.

Not long ago, I learned how to weld MIG/TIG, how to use a brake press, and a lathe.

More recently, I learned how to ride a motorcycle.

As expected, a few things I discovered were already invented. As a child, I reinvented the flip flop and tried to build it using electromagnets, a toy train power adapter, wood and nails.

In the late 1990s I discovered the STING curve, only to find that economist Art Laffer had discovered a similar curve, the Laffer curve, a decade earlier.

I discovered the unique property of what I called a pulsar, a star figure with numbers similar to a magic square that has two different solutions, only to find that two mathematicians from Israel had found it twenty years earlier.

I have no idea of what will come next, but it’s going to be fun.

Technical Biography

• Received his doctorate’s degree in Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy, 1973, with a dissertation on his design and implementation of communication software connecting heterogeneous computers (IBM VM-CMS and HP).

• Joined the IBM Scientific Center in Pisa to be part of the R&D team that developed the RPCNET network in cooperation with the CNUCE institute of the Italian National Research Council. RPCNET connected for the first time the mainframe computers of four Italian universities.

• His work on the development of RPCNET on IBM MVS mainframes was published at the Conference on “Dissemination of Information” sponsored by the IEEE and the ACM (San Marino, 1976).

• Was member of first R&D team to develop a peer-to-peer, packet switching network (PISA), alternative to the ARPA network and precursor of the internet (IBM Italy, 1977).

• Was assistant professor of Computer Theory and Application at the faculty of Computer Science, University of Pisa, (1974-1978).

• Joined IBM Canada and designed and implemented X.25 packet switching software for IBM Series/1 mini-computers and for IBM 5251 Cluster Controllers using Intel microprocessors (IBM Canada Lab, 1978-1981).

• While with IBM Canada, Giuseppe developed: ◦ A system of memory optimization for I/O buffers, which was submitted for patent application. ◦ A system of macros to program the Intel 8080 microprocessor with the much more powerful instruction set of the Intel 8086. This was presented at the IBM technical innovation conference in Atlanta, GA.

• Joined Canada Systems Group and designed a model for a Distributed Information Bank: “A Connectivity and Integrity Protocol for a Distributed Information Bank” (Proceedings of Communication in Distributed Systems, Springer Informatik book series, Berlin, 1983).

• Joined GEAC Computers and developed the management software for the GEAC communication network. GEAC Computers, at the time was the only Canadian mainframe software and hardware manufacturer.

• Was selected as a voting member of the Technical Committee on Open Systems of the Canadian Standards Association.

• Represented Canada as a member of the Open System Interconnection Technical Committee of the International Standards Organization (ISO) in global meetings in Sidney, Tokyo, London, Seoul, Ottawa and Florence.

• Was chairman of the ISO Canadian Working Group on Open Distributed Processing - Systems Management, and represented Canada in global international meetings.

• Developed, sold and installed PC-Automation, an innovative, real time, memory based, intelligent software system using the C-language. One personal computer controlled the whole assembly line and replaced several low-level language PLC’s (1990).

• Was a Visiting Professor, teaching a graduate course on computer communication, at the Faculty of Computer Science, at Western University, London, Ontario.

• As a consultant to Bell Canada: ◦ Developed a Telecommunication Open System Architecture (TOSA); ◦ Troubleshooted their DIVA office automation software based on UNIX (Uniplex) and recommended DIVA’s cancellation. ◦ Traveled to Phoenix, AZ, to evaluate Hypercom, a router manufacturer, and contributed to Bell’s choice of Cisco as a router supplier.

• As a consultant to GN Navtel, designed the support software for their family of Sniffer devices, to be used with Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDN).

• As a Consultant to Unitel (now AT&T Canada) Developed a test plan and a test lab for the encrypted network for the National Bank of Canada, including the management of encryption keys.

• Co-founder and CTO of INTR, a startup in Mississauga, ON, that developed a Point od Sale touch-screen terminal in partnership with NCR Canada (2001).

• Founder and CEO of Central Dynamics, a manufacturing company in the US, that produced and sold the only electronically controlled swimming treadmill on the market (2005).

• Was awarded the first prize in 2015 by Innocentive in an international competition for future technology, developing an energy saving and water saving clothes cleaning system.

• Designed the only distributed consensus protocol for blockchain networks (MARPLE). Current protocols, such as Paxos, PoW, PoS, etc. are lead-based: One node broadcasts the block to all other nodes. MARPLE involves all nodes and reaches consensus by majority agreement among randomly created and dynamic logical environs (2016).

• Created a model for the addressability and unique identification of users, devices and nodes in a public, un-permissioned crypto-network without involving personal information (2017).