Roberto Baldoni served as the first Director General of the National Cybersecurity Agency of Italy (ACN), established under Decree Law 82/2021, from 2021 to 2023. Appointed by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, he was instrumental in the legal, operational, and logistical establishment of the Agency and recruited its initial core team of 170 highly qualified employees (+60 ended successfully rigorous hiring phase). All this in a few weeks during a very complex geopolitical time. Prior to this, appointed by Prime Minister Gentiloni, he held the position of Deputy Director General at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers of Italy from December 2017 to August 2021. During his term he conceived and led the working group drafting the National Security Perimeter law for Cyber (DL105/2019) and led its development till March 2023, he headed the activities that brought to the National Cybersecurity Strategy (aligned with the Next Generation EU program) signed by the Prime Minister in May 2022 and the ones that brought to of the new National Cybersecurity Architecture and to the creation of the ACN (DL82/2021). With Minister Vittorio Colao developed the National Cloud Strategy in 2021.
Prior to his significant contributions in public service, Roberto Baldoni was a full professor of computer science at Sapienza University of Rome, a position he held from 2002 until December 2021, taking a leave from December 2017. His research has profoundly influenced fields such as distributed, pervasive, and peer-to-peer computing, middleware platforms, and information systems infrastructure, with a special focus on dependability and security. A selection of his publications is available on
DBLP, and
Scholar Google.
Roberto Baldoni has been Chair of the IEEE committee on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance and Chair of the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks. He is also member of the IFIP WG 10.4 and member of the steering committees of ACM DEBS (Conference on Distributed Event Based Systems) At the national level he has been the founder of the Italian Conference on Cybersecurity (ITASEC). He has been for many years member of the editorial boad of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He has been Dean of the School of Engineering in Computer Science at Sapienza University (2011-2014) and the diector pf the PhD program in enginneing in Computer Science at Sapienza (2008-2011).
Roberto's leadership extends beyond academia as he has spearheaded many international research and innovation projects as a principal investigator. He is the founding Director of the National Cybersecurity Laboratory of CINI and the Sapienza Research Center of Cyber Intelligence and Information Security.
Roberto Baldoni led the public-private working groups developing the "Cybersecurity National Framework" in 2015 and the "National Cybersecurity Essentials" (in italian). He also has been the founder with Camil Demetrescu of Cyberchallenge.IT in 2017. Roberto Baldoni invented and co-edited the Italian White Book on Cybersecurity (in Italian). Alongside his scientific and managerial prowess, Roberto is also an active voice in technology governance and the geopolitics of technology, featuring editorials and articles regularly.
Here for a curated list of his writings. He is also the author of a
book on the threats to digital sovereignty published in 2014 (italian vesion is expected to be out early 2025).
Roberto Baldoni has been associated Researcher at Cornell University (US) and INRIA (France) as well as visiting professor at EPFL (Switzerland), University of Rennes (France) and University of Southampton (U.K.). Currently he is Central
Director@ACN, Department Chair @IEEE Security&Privacy magazine and honorary professor @Sapienza University of Rome.