Sergio Saponara

Prof. Sergio Saponara, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, got his Master Degree cum laude and PhD degree, both in Electronic Engineering, from University of Pisa. In 2002 he was a Marie Curie Research fellow at the Inter-university-Microelectronics Center (IMEC), Leuven, Belgium. He was also post-graduate researcher of the National Research Council. He is Full Professor of Electronics. He teaches courses of Vehicular Electronics, Electronic Systems for Robotics, HW and Embedded Security at Pisa University for the Master degrees in Vehicle Engineering, Robotics and Automation Engineering and Cybersecurity. He also teaches Electronics at the Italian Naval Academy in Livorno.

He is the President of the Bachelor and Master degrees in Electronic Engineering at University of Pisa. He is also Director of the summer school "Enabling technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT)";Director of the specialization course "Automotive Electronics and Powertrain Electrification"; Vice Director of the inter-University Center for Automotive Research (UCAR)

He is member of 2 IEEE standardization activities, of the Technical committees TC-7 and TC-19 of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society, and TC-VLSI of the IEEE Computer Society, and he is co-founder of the IEEE Special Interest groups in IoT of the CAS and SP societies, and He is member of the World Forum on IoT. He served in the organization of 150 international conferences, most from IEEE and SPIE and as guest editor of 14 special issues in several ISI journals. He served as member of the reviewing board of more than 50 journals from IEEE, IET, Elsevier and Springer. He held plenary/invited talks and tutorials at IEEE and SPIE conferences. He is also Associate Editor and Editorial Board member of 11 international peer-reviewed journals: the journals “IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine”, “IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine”, “IEEE Canadian Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering”, the IEEE Transactions in Industrial Informatics, “IEEE TC-VLSI Letters”, "Journal of Real-Time Image Processing" from SpringerNature, the "Electronics Letters" from IET, the journal “Energies”, “Sensors” and "Designs" from MDPI, the "Journal of Wireless Communications" from SISPRESS. He is member of the Engineering PhD school at Pisa University. His research interests include embedded computing engineering, integrated electronics and applied electronic systems, sensor/actuator interfacing and DSP for new measurement systems.

He co-authored more than 300 international scientific publications and 20 patents.

He got best paper awards at PRIME 2007, StreamingDay2010, GE2007, best presentation award at IEEE IECON 2016, and the 2nd prize at the Element-14 Medical design award 2011.

An abstract of his PhD thesis was awarded at the 1st EDAA PhD forum in Munich, 2003, and he received the "premio giovane ricercatore" from the Senato Accademico-University of Pisa in 1999 and he has been awarded as “Ricercatore del mese” in 2019. He got also the "Outstanding Reviewer Award" from Elsevier in 2015 and “Outstanding Editor award” from the TC-VLSI IEEE Computer Science in 2019. In the VQR 2004-2010 and 2011-2014 all his submitted scientific works have been evaluated with the grade "excellent".

His technology transfer activity includes collaborations with STMicroelectronics, Renesas, Selex, Ericsson, Piaggio, Magna, AustriaMicroSystems, CAEN, Sitael, Intecs, Rico, Flyby, Marelli, CarbonDream, Vitesco Technologies (Continental), PurePowerControl, Solari, Maserati, Infineon, BMW, CRF, AVL

He is co-founder and Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of Ingeniars srl a spin-off company of the University of Pisa, which has been in the top 10 Tuscany start-up companies awarded at the StartCup2014 competition and has been awarded in Horizon 2020 within the SME Instruments program.

He served as project manager or WP manager in several national and international research projects (PRIN, FIRB, POR-CREO, ESA, INFN, FP6, FP7, H2020) including a MISTI common project with MIT and the H2020 European Processor Initiative where he is Steering Committee member, University of Pisa leader, leader for the Cybersecurity WP.

He is associate member of the Italian National Institutes for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and of the National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT) and for Informatics (CINI). He joined the NEWCOM and HIPEAC European networks of excellence.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergio-saponara-3031431/

Contact: sergio.saponara@iet.unipi.it

Abstracts

New trends in Heterogenous Architectures for HPC

The lecture shows new trends on HPC architectures, which will be based on heterogenous platforms mixing GPPs (General-Purpose-Processor) and accelerators. At the GPP side, new multi-core Arm 64b solutions with scalable vector extension recently emerged as valid alternative to classic Xeon. At the accelerator side, GPUs are the dominating solution, although FPGAs and custom accelerators are also adopted. Quantum-computing accelerators will be the new frontier. The potentiality of RISC-V ISA for HPC effort is also addressed at R&D level. The innovation in HPC architectures addresses also cooling aspects. The classic air-cooled approach is no more suitable for the high power density achieved with recent nanoscale technologies. Hence, liquid-cooled approach is becoming the mainstream solution for high-end HPC cabinets. In the cooling field the research is focused on immersive cooling and/or bi-phase cooling. The lecture will report recent results achieved in EuroHPC projects with Prof. Sergio Saponara as UNIPISA/CINI leader such as Textarossa, European-Processor-Initiative SGA1 and SGA2, The-European-Pilot, Eupex, AERO:accelerating the European Cloud and DARE: Digital Autonomy with RISC-V in Europe.

Advances in Real-time Cybersecurity: post-quantum crypto, homomorphism and AI-based IDS

The lecture shows the new trends in HW and embedded solutions for Cybersecurity such as:

• HW accelerators for real-time cryptographic functions, including Post-Quantum Crypto algorithms with a focus on those recently standardized by NIST (Crystals Kyber and Dlithium)
• Optimized HW and SW solutions for Homomorphic encryption for user data privacy in servers with ARM Neoverse and SVE v1 and/or V2, exploiting SEAL full-homomorphic library
• AI-based intrusion detection systems and fingerpriting vs. masquarade, substitution and spoofing attacks in CAN and in Ethernet networks for mission critical applications susch as vehicles, industry 4.0