Research Activities and a Brief History of CNR-IEIIT

Summary of Activities

The research institute IEIIT is part of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR). CNR is a public organization; its duty is to carry out, promote, spread, transfer and improve research activities in the main sectors of knowledge growth and of its applications for the scientific, technological, economic and social development of the Country. In particular, the IEIIT institute (Institute for Electronics, Engineering, Information and Telecommunications) carries out scientific and technological qualified research in the areas of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), in collaboration with Italian and foreign universities, government agencies and industries. The CNR-IEIIT institute in organized in five research sections, with different areas of activity:

• Torino (Main Research Center and Headquarters):
  
  • ICT
  • Communications
  • Computer Engineering
  • Electromagnetic
  • Signal Processing
  • Systems and Control



• Bologna:
  
  • ICT
  • Communications
  • Computer Engineering



• Genova:
  
  • Communication Systems
  • Computer Engineering



• Milano:
  
  • Communications
  • Computer Engineering
  • Electromagnetic
  • Systems and Control



• Pisa:
  
  • Electronics
  • Microelectronics and Communications

Control of Complex Systems

The IEIIT research group on Control of Complex Systems is very active in the development of methodologies and algorithms for analysis and design of uncertain systems, and related applications. In recent years, this group has become one of the internationally leading teams in the study of probabilistic methods and randomized algorithms. In contrast to existing methods, the starting point of this line of research is to introduce a probabilistic description of the uncertainty set. Then, unlike classical deterministic methods, randomized algorithms are developed. These algorithms give a probabilistic assessment regarding the satisfaction of given specifications, with polynomial-time computations. Randomized algorithms are therefore of interest to the control engineers, and are used together with classical robustness methods, to obtain useful additional insight on the specific problem under attention. On these topics several international activities have been performed. In particular, the book titled “Randomized Algorithms for Analysis and Control of Uncertain Systems” has been published. Several invited lectures and short courses have been delivered at various institutions and more than thirty papers have been published on this specific subject in top level international journals. Regarding specific applications, these techniques have been used for the design of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and the computation of PageRank in the Google search engine.

A Brief History

The Institute IEIIT (Institute for Electronics, Engineering, Information and Telecommunications) was founded in 2001 by the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) merging five existing units distributed in various Italian cities (Bologna, Genova, Milano, Pisa and Torino). The headquarter of IEIIT is located at Politecnico di Torino, and its permanent staff consists of about sixty researchers, technical staff and administrative personnel. Research at IEIIT is very broad and productive, covering all areas of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), including antennas and propagation, communications and networking, computer engineering, signal processing, systems and control. The unit of IEIIT located at Politecnico di Torino sprang from a previous CNR Institute, named IRITI, which was founded in 1999. IRITI originated from the merge of three existing CNR centers (CENS, CESPA and CSTV) which were very active in the area of electrical engineering for several years. In particular, CENS (Center for Signal Processing) and CESPA (Center for Antennas and Propagation) were founded in 1970 by CNR and Politecnico di Torino. CSTV (Center for Broadcasting and Television), was originally established in 1949, based on a joint agreement between CNR, IENGF (National Institute Galileo Ferraris) and RAI (Italian Public Broadcasting Corporation). In 1971, the center CSTV was reorganized using a revised agreement between CNR and IENGF. In the seventies, the research activities at CENS were focused on developing hardware and software for signal processing, with specific attention to speech recognition. Starting from the eighties, research expanded to other areas within electrical engineering. In particular, computer architectures and networks, system identification and control played a prominent role at CENS for many years. Currently, these fields of research constitute one of the focal points of activities at IEIIT.