Luca implemented the first compiler for ML (the most popular typed functional language) and one ot the earliest direct-manipulation user-interface editors. He was a member of the Modula-3 design committee and has designed a few experimental languages, of which the latest are Obliq, a distributed higher-order scripting language, and Polyphonic C#, an object-oriented language with modern concurrency abstractions. His more protracted research activity has been in establishing the semantic and type-theoretic foundations of object-oriented languages.
Lucas was born in Montecatini Terme, Italy, studied at the University of Pisa until 1979 and has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh (1982). He worked at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, from 1982 to 1985 and at Digital Equipment Corporation, Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, from 1985 to 1997 before assuming his current position at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.
Systems Biology is a new discipline aiming to understand the behavior of biological systems as it results from the (non-trivial, "emergent") interaction of biological components. We discuss some biological networks that are characterized by simple components, but by complex interactions. The components are separately described in stochastic pi-calculus, which is a "programming language" that should scale up to description of large systems. The components are then wired together, and their interactions are studied by stochastic simulation. Subtle and unexpected behavior emerges even from simple circuits, and yet stable behavior emerges too, giving some hints about what may be critical and what may be irrelevant in the organization of biological networks.