High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Robert Mario Fano (born 1917 in Turin, Italy, as Roberto Mario Fano) is an Italian-American computer scientist, currently professor emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fano is known principally for his work on information theory, inventing (with Claude Shannon) Shannon-Fano coding. In the early 1960s, he was involved in the development of time-sharing computers, and served as director of MIT`s Project MAC from its founding in 1963 until 1968.