Francesco Roccucci · AI Director

So for me, I can say I'm super lucky, because I always dreamt of doing this, and eventually I've been lucky enough to manage to get it. Of course, it's not just luck. It's a lot of effort you need to put in, and a lot of energy, blood and tears, but also in life you always need to be lucky to find yourself in the right position at the right moment. But basically, I think it was when my dad bought a Commodore 64. Well, I think it started a little bit earlier. I was at my cousin's place, and he had a Videopac, a Philips, very popular in Italy at that time, a little console. And I still remember it. I was probably four. But I still remember nowadays that feeling of looking at the screen and having this joystick that was moving stuff on the screen, and I was like, wow, this is fantastic. And then my cousin got a Commodore 64, I got a Commodore 64, and I started to program, and I just started to mimic him pretty much, because I loved to do that. And yeah, that's where I started to program. I was probably seven. And at that moment, in Italy especially, it was not so much about artificial intelligence per se. There were people talking about it, but there were no computer science studies. It was electronic engineering. So I was always saying, I want to study to become an electronic engineer and do video games. And that's where I started.