Piero Scaruffi has been a lecturer at U.C. Berkeley and the California Institute for Integral Studies on the topics of Theories of the Mind and History of Knowledge. He is also a new media designer and consultant on Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) technologies. Scaruffi has had a 20-year research career in the computer industry, pioneering AI and other technologies. His main areas of research are Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Self-Organizing Systems and Theories of Consciousness. Scaruffi has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and Stanford Universities and has lectured extensively at academic and industrial institutions on three continents. He has authored five books on Cognitive Science, the most recent of which is The Nature of Consciousness (2006). He has also written extensively about music, including A History of Jazz Music (2007) and A History of Rock Music (2003). He has also published poetry, both in Italian and in English.

In 2008 he started the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASERs) at San Francisco State University, which later migrated to University of San Francisco (2009), SETI Institute (2010) and Stanford University (2011). Poetry and nonfiction have been collected in Synthesis (2010). He co-authored the History of Silicon Valley (2011). In 2011-12 he chaired large interdisciplinary events at Stanford University.