Bio

Gianluigi Ferrari was born in Parma, Italy, on November 13, 1974. He received the "Laurea" degree (5-year program) in Electrical Engineering "summa cum laude" from the University of Parma, Parma, Italy in October 1998. He received the Ph.D. degree in "Information Technologies" from the Department of Information Engineering (Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, DII) of the University of Parma in January 2002. From July 2000 to December 2001 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Communication Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA. Between February 2002 and August 2002, he was a Postdoc Student at the DII, University of Parma.

Between September 2002 and October 2010, he was a Research Professor at the DII of the University of Parma. Between November 2010 and February 2023, he was an Associate Professor at the same department (he received the Italian nation-wide habilitation from Polytechnic of Milan in August 2010): in 2017, the DII has been merged with other engineering departments and architecture and is now the Department of Engineering and Architecture (Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Architettura, DIA). In December 2013, he received the "Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale" (National Scientific Qualification) for Full Professorship in Telecommunications. Since March 2023, he has been a Full Professor at the DIA.

During October 2002-February 2003, July-December 2003 and July-December 2004, he was a Research Associate at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Since September 2006 he has been the Coordinator of the Internet of Things (IoT) Laboratory. In Fall 2007 he visited, as a DUO-Thailand Fellow, the King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL), Bangkok, Thailand. Between July 2010 and October 2010, he was a Visiting Researcher, within a "Brains (Back) to Brussels" (B2B) program, at the OPERA Department of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. In 2018 and 2019 he visited National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Hsinchu, Taiwan (in 2021 NCTU merged with National Yang-Ming University into the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University).

He had/has the following main roles.

In 2015-2018, he was appointed, by the Italian Ministry of Defense, as the only Italian representative (Technical Team Member) in the NATO RTG HFM-260 "Enhancing Warfighter Effectiveness with Wearable Bio Sensors and Physiologicol Models."

Since 2019, he has been a member (expert of Telecommunications/IoT and the only Italian representative) of the 6-member Scientific Council of the INSIDE Industry Association, the key association for Intelligent Systems in Europe.

Since 2020, he has been a member of 4-member board of the Scientific Council of Consiglio Scientifico del Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario delle Telecomunicazioni (CNIT).

Since 2020, he has been vice-Director of the Inter-deparmental Center Future Technology Lab of the University of Parma.

Since 2021, he has been Head of the Corso di Laurea in Ingegneria Informatica, Elettronica e delle Telecomunicazioni (Bachelor Degree in Computer Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications) of the University of Parma.

As of March 2023, he has (published/edited or in press): 138 papers in international journals; 39 book chapters; 13 books (11 in English and 2 in Italian); 162 papers in international conference proceedings; 17 patents (submitted/accepted, Italian/international); and 11 papers in national conferences. He is a co-recipient of:

a Best Student Paper Award at the 2006 International Workshop on Wireless Ad Hoc Networks (IWWAN'06), New York, NY, USA, June 2006;

a Best Paper Award at the Second International Conference on Emerging Network Intelligence (EMERGING 2010), Florence, Italy, October 2010;

the first Body Sensor Network (BSN) contest winner award (as member of the WASNLab team), held in conjunction with the 8th International Conference on Body Sensor Networks (BSN 2011), Dallas, TX, USA, May 2011;

an Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to the 11th International Conference on ITS Telecommunications (ITST-2011), Saint Petersburg, Russia, August 2011;

the Best Paper Award at the 1st International Conference on Sensor Networks (SENSORNETS 2012), Rome, Italy, February 2012;

the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications13), Track on Nature-inspired Techniques for Communication Networks and other Parallel and Distributed Systems (EvoCOMNET 2013), Vienna, Austria, April 2013;

the Best Runner-up Paper Award at the 11th International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN 2014), Zurich, Switzerland, June 2014;

the Best Conference Paper Award at the 22nd International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM 2014), Symposium on RFID Technologies and Internet of Things, Split, Croatia, September 2014;

the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications15), Track on Nature-inspired Techniques for Communication Networks and other Parallel and Distributed Systems (EvoCOMNET 2015), Copenhagen, Denmark, April 2015;

the honors status recognition, in 2018, by Elsevier Computers in Biology and Medicine for a journal paper published in 2017 (top 9% of over 300 papers published in 2017);

the Editor's choice article status given to the paper "LoRaFarM: a LoRaWAN-based smart farming modular IoT architecture,” published in Sensors in 2020;

the Editor's choice article status given to the paper "On driver behavior recognition for increased safety: a roadmap,” published in Safety in 2020;

the Editor's choice article status given to the paper "Hybrid LoRa-IEEE 802.11s opportunistic mesh networking for flexible UAV swarming,” published in Drones in 2021. This paper was also featured as the Cover Story of the June 2021 (vol. 5, no. 2) issue of Drones.

In 2021, he has been included in the world's top 2% of Scientists List on the basis of both his performance in 2020 and career-long. See also the list of nominees from the Department of Engineering and Architecture at the University of Parma.

In 2023, he was included, on the basis of his Discipline-index (D-index), in the Research.com list of best scientists in Electronics and Electrical Engineering (ranking 162-nd in Italy and 4353-rd in the world) and in Computer Science (ranking 180-th in Italy and 6819-th in the world). See also the list of nominees from the Department of Engineering and Architecture at the University of Parma.

In 2023, he was included, on the basis of his h-index, in the list of list of Top Italian Scientists in Engineering (ranking 176-th worldwide).

He has been TPC of many international conferences (over 560) and currently serves on the editorial boards of a few international journals and as Series Editor for Springer. He is an IEEE Senior Member.

GF has participated in several research projects funded by public and private bodies. In particular, his research activity has been funded, throughout the years, from: University of Parma, Trellisware Technologies Inc. (USA, while at the University of Southern California), US Army Research Office (USA, while visiting Carnegie Mellon University), Region Emilia-Romagna, Italian Ministry of Information, University and Research (MIUR), Cisco Systems Inc. (USA), Id-Solutions, So.Ri.Ge, Finmeccanica, Elsag-Datamat, ASEM-DUO Fellowship Programme (while visiting King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Thailand), CNIT, Selta, Elettric80, Guglielmo, Regione de Bruxelles-Capitale (Belgium) through "Brains (Back) to Brussels" program (while visiting the Université Libre de Bruxelles), MC INFORMATICA E TELECOMUNICAZIONI, Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE), EU Commission (FP7 program, European Food Safety Authority, H2020 program), Huawei Technologies, Multritraccia, ISI, Tanaza, Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Bertel, Itera Innovazioni, Movym, Wegh Group, B810 group, BOSCH, Reios, UnipolSai, things2i, Argotractors, GlaxoSmithKlyne, ASK Group and others. In particular, he was the coordinator of UNIPR within the FP7 project CALIPSO (Connect All IP-based Smart Objects!) in the period 2011-2014 and is the coordinator of UNIPR in the H2020 projects AfarCloud (Aggregate Farming in the Cloud, 2018-2021), ADACORSA (Airborne DAta COllection on Resilient System Architectures, 2020-2023), NextPerception (Next generation smart perception sensors and distributed intelligence for proactive human monitoring in health, wellbeing, and automotive systems, 2020-2023), InSecTT (Intelligent Secure Trustable Things, 2020-2023) and in the Horizon Europe project OPEVA (OPtimization of Electrical Vehicle Autonomy, 2023-2025). He is also active in the National Restart and Resilience Plan (Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza, PNRR): Agritech (National Center for Agricultural Technologies, 2022-2025) and DARE (DigitAl lifelong pRevEntion, 2022-2026). Overall, the amount of funding brought (directly or indirectly) to his Department is over 5 M€. Since 2016, he is co-founder, President and CEO of things2i s.r.l., a spin-off company of the University of Parma dedicated to IoT and smart systems.