CNIT (Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni) is a non-profit consortium established in 1995 and bringing together 37 public Italian universities to perform research, innovation and education/training activities in the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). CNIT also owns four National Laboratories: “Multimedia Communications”, in Naples; “Photonic Networks & Technologies”, in Pisa; “Radar and Surveillance Systems”, in Pisa; “Smart and Secure Networks”, in Genoa. More than 1,300 professors and researchers, belonging to the member universities, collaborate within CNIT, together with more than 100 CNIT own employees. CNIT participated in hundreds of research projects, including EU coordinated projects, ERC grants and Italian nation-wide initiatives. In the EU H2020 program, CNIT has obtained 41 projects and coordinated 10 of them. CNIT’s funding comes only from private companies and competitive programs (in the years 2014-17 CNIT secured 102 national research projects and 243 Industrial projects).
Profile of key persons:
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Nicola Blefari-Melazzi (male, http://blefari.eln.uniroma2.it/) is a full Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Roma Tor Vergata, where he served as Chair of the PhD program in Telecommunications, Chair of the undergraduate and graduate programs in Telecommunications Engineering and Chair of the Department of Electronic Engineering. He is currently the Director of CNIT. He has participated in about 30 EU projects, playing the role of project coordinator for six of them. He has been an elected member of the 5G Public Private Partnership association (https://5g-ppp.eu/), a 1.4 Billion Euro initiative established to create the next generation of communication networks. He served as TPC member, TPC Chair and General Chair for IEEE Conferences and guest editor for IEEE Journals. He is author/co-author of about 200 papers. His research interests lie in the field of performance evaluation, design and control of telecommunications networks.
- Andrea Conti (male) is a Full Professor at the University of Ferrara, Italy. Since 2003, he has been a frequent visitor to the Wireless Information and Network Sciences Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he presently holds the Research Affiliate appointment. His research encompasses communication and information theories together with statistical inference and optimization for solving real-world problems. His research interests involve theory and experimentation of wireless systems and networks including network localization and navigation, adaptive diversity communications, and distributed stochastic sensing. His research received important recognitions: he is recipient of the HTE Puskás Tivadar Medal and co-recipient of the IEEE Communications Society’s Stephen O. Rice Prize in the Field of Communications Theory and the IEEE Communications Society’s Fred W. Ellersick Prize. He is a co-author of “Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks: Enabling Technologies, Information Processing and Protocol Design,” (Elsevier, 2008). He has served as editor for IEEE journals, as well as chaired international conferences. He has been elected Chair of the IEEE Communications Society’s Radio Communications Technical Committee. He is an elected Fellow of the IET and has been selected as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer. He has been leader in national and international projects.
- Stefania Bartoletti (female) is a researcher at the National Research Council of Italy (IEIIT-CNR) in the Research Unit of Bologna. She was a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Global Fellow within the Horizon 2020 European Framework for a research project with the Wireless Information & Network Science Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Ferrara (2016–2019). Her research interests include theory and experimentation of passive localization and tracking networks, especially with application to wireless sensor radar and physical behaviour analysis. She is recipient of the 2016 Paul Baran Young Scholar Award of the Marconi Society. Dr. Bartoletti served as a Chair of the TPC for the IEEE ICC Workshop on Advances in Network Localization and Navigation (ANLN) from 2017 to 2020, as TPC member for numerous IEEE international conferences, and as a reviewer for several IEEE journals.