Letizia Leonardi is a Full Professor at the Department of Engineering "Enzo Ferrari" (DIEF) of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. In Dec. 1982, she received a Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering, and, in Feb. 1989, she received her Ph.D. in Electronics and Computer Science from the University of Bologna. She was (Aug. 1990-Oct. 1992) a Research Assistant at the DEIS (Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems), University of Bologna. In addition, she was an Associate Professor of the Engineering Faculty of the University of Modena (Nov. 1992-Oct. 2001). She teaches basic and advanced computer science courses at the Faculty of Engineering. She has been the supervisor of seven PhD students. Her main research activities are primarily in the following areas: Smart and Digital Factories in Industry 4.0; mobile agents: basic models and coordination protocols; object-oriented models, languages and environments; parallelism and distribution issues, specially applied to object systems; design and implementation of parallel object environments on distributed, massively parallel, and heterogeneous architectures. She has published about 150 papers in national and international journals (more than 40) and conference proceedings, and she is taking (and has taken) part in several Italian and International projects. She regularly writes technical reviews of books and papers for journals and conferences at both national and international levels.