TO
- Dr. Filippo Menczer
- Dr. Ruj Akavipat
- Dr Le-Shin Wu

cc: Prof. Francesco Beltrame, Head of the ICT Dept. of CNR

Gentlepersons

I am the director of the Institute for High Performance Computing and 
Networking of the Italian National Research Council ("Istituto di Calcolo 
e Reti ad Alte Prestazioni" ICAR-CNR). I am writing to you concerning the 
episodes of plagiarism reported in  the WEB page 
http://homer.informatics.indiana.edu/~nan/6S/plagiarism/, as 
I noticed that ICAR-CNR is indirectly involved in some of such episodes.

First of all, on behalf of ICAR-CNR, let me apologize for all the 
responsibilities that the Institute may have inadvertently had in the episodes.
Then, I would like to make two main remarks on what is reported in the mentioned page:

(1) The main affiliation of Prof. Salvatore Gaglio is "Dipartimento di Ingegneria 
Informatica, Universitˆ degli Studi di Palermo" 
(http://www.csai.unipa.it/cclinfo/registred/docenti/pub/personalall.asp?id_doc=26); 
he only holds a part time (two months per year) appointment with the Palermo's 
branch of ICAR-CNR with management engagements. So the reference to his home page 
should be updated.

(2) Dr. Alfonso Urso is indeed a full time researcher of ICAR-CNR but he is coauthor 
of only one of the 6 offending papers (paper 2 in the list, "Reinforcement Learning 
for P2P Searching", Proc. 7th International Workshop on Computer Architecture for 
Machine Perception (CAMP'05), pp. 303-308); instead, as it is written in the mentioned 
WEB page,  Dr. Urso appears to be a coauthor of all of them.  Therefore, may I ask you 
to clarify this fact in the WEB pages as well as with Dr. Mark Mandelbaum and Dr. Vincent Shen? 
In addition, I inquired with the authors and I was told that Urso's contribution was 
limited to the learning issues introduced in that paper, which apparently are not implicated 
in the plagiarism. So I got the conviction he has no responsibility in the plagiarism, 
as also confirmed by the fact that he was not involved in the explanation e-mails sent 
from the other authors. Please let me know whether you have a different evidence. 
I have also asked Dr. Urso to send a letter both to me and to all of you explaining 
his role and contribution to the mentioned paper.

On the basis of the above remarks, as director of ICAR-CNR, I cannot take any official 
action either against Professor Gaglio, whose research activities are not under the 
direct responsibility of ICAR-CNR, or against Dr. Urso, whose implication in the 
plagiarism episodes should be excluded according to my present evidences. I can 
only express my profound sympathies to all of you for the professional damages 
that have been caused by the deplorable behavior of the offending authors, although, 
from my acquaintance with them, I am very positive that it was due more by negligence 
rather than by academic dishonesty.

Looking forward to hearing from you, I remain

Sincerely yours

Domenico Sacca'

_____________________________________
Prof. Domenico Saccˆ
Direttore dell'Istituto di Calcolo e Reti ad Alte Prestazioni
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Indirizzo: ICAR-CNR, Via P. Bucci 41C, 87036 Rende (CS), Italy