In the last decades, Computer Engineering has shown an impressive development and has become a pervasive protagonist in daily life and scientific research. Databases and Artificial Intelligence represent two of the major players in this development. Today, they are quickly converging towards a new, much more sophisticated and inclusive, paradigm, namely Cognitive Computing. This paradigm leverages Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to design approaches and build systems capable of (at least partially) reproducing human brain behavior. In this paradigm, an important role can be also played by Mathematical Programming. Cognitive systems are able to autonomously learn, reason, understand and process a huge amount of extremely varied data. Their ultimate goal is the capability of interacting naturally with their users. In the last 50 years, UNIVPM has played a leading role in scientific research in Databases and Artificial Intelligence, and, thanks to the acquired expertise, is going to play a key role in Cognitive Computing research in the future
