2020-II Call

Application deadline: November 7-th (noon) 2020
Requirements: students enrolled at the first semester of the second year of the MSc track, with 50 CFUs and 28 GPA
Application: website
Available positions:
  • 9 Automation and Control Engineering
  • 20 Computer Science and Engineering
  • 5 Electronic Engineering
  • 6 Telecommunication Engineering


Research topics in Automation and Control Engineering

Proposers: Matteo Corno, Lorenzo Fagiano, Simone Formentin, Luigi Piroddi, Maria Prandini, Sergio Savaresi, Riccardo Scattolini, Mara Tanelli.
Topic: Theory and application of control systems
The research area includes all the topics related to the theory and application of modeling, control, identification and learning methods for dynamic systems. Applications include, but are not limited to, energy systems, smart grids, vehicles.
Compatible tracks: ATM, CSE, MTM
Positions available: 3
Proposers: Paolo Bolzern, Patrizio Colaneri, Gian Paolo Incremona.
Topic: Optimization and control of complex systems
The research area includes all topics related to optimization and control for complex systems possibly interacting over a network or involving hybrid dynamics. Examples include social, transportation and power networks.
Compatible tracks: ATM, CSE, MTM
Positions available: 3
Proposers: Luca Bascetta, Gianbattista Gruosso, Luca Ferrarini, Michele Norgia, Paolo Rocco.
Topic: Robotics, mechatronics, and industrial automation
The research area includes topics related to modelling and control of robots (industrial, mobile, aerial) and mechatronic systems in general. The broader areas of industrial automation, building automation and industrial measurement are included as well. Experimental facilities to validate the theoretical results will be available.
Compatible tracks: ATM, CSE, MECC
Positions available: 3


Research topics in Computer Science and Engineering


Track CSE - Advanced software architectures and methodologies
Proposers: Giovanni Agosta
Topic: Compiler Construction & Programming Language Implementation
The research area covers dynamic and static compiler techniques (including decompilation) aiming at extra-functional goals such as performance, energy efficiency, security, functional and performance portability, as well as the design and implementation of parallel programming models and domain specific languages (e.g., Modelica).
Compatible tracks: CSE (all subtopics), ATM (Modelica)
Proposers: Marcello M. Bersani
Topic: Observability at runtime
While monitorability provides evidence for predicting failures, observability aims to provide highly granular insights. The objective is to design syntactical extensions of languages and a framework that enable software observability and that allow designers to deploy observable applications.
Compatible tracks: CSE
Proposers: Gianpaolo Cugola
Topic: Models for Event-based and Big Data Streaming Applications
Many information systems need to make sense of large streams of events to detect relevant and critical situations. Our research group investigates new models and languages to "reason" on streaming data, while also coping with the volume, velocity, and variety of the events in the stream.
Compatible tracks: CSE
Proposers: Alessandro Margara
Topic: Programming Paradigms for Data-Intensive Applications
As data guides the decision making process of increasingly many human activities, software applications become data-intensive: they need to manage and analyze large volumes of data as they become available. Our research group investigates new paradigms to make data-intensive applications easier to develop and more efficient, also exploiting massively parallel hardware and distributed infrastructures.
Compatible tracks: CSE
Proposers: Luca Mottola
Topic: The Battery-less Internet of Things
Energy harvesting is redefining the energy constraints of traditional battery-powered IoT devices. However, such sources of energy are generally erratic, causing systems to shutdown unpredictably. We devise new software techniques to render IoT software immune to periods of energy unavailability.
Compatible tracks: CSE, TLC
Proposers: Matteo Pradella
Topic: Structured Context-Free Languages for Parallel Analysis and Verification
The object of this work is to apply techniques based on Operator Precedence (OP) languages for: code verification through model-checking; analysis of massive structured data; runtime verification of critical applications.
Compatible tracks: CSE
Proposers: Matteo Rossi
Topic: Model-Driven development of robotic applications for service robots
Robots are moving out of factories and into environments such as hospitals, homes, etc., where they cooperate with humans. The research focuses on model-driven approaches for designing Human-Robot Cooperation (HRC) applications that guarantee the safety of users and the achievement of applications' objectives through the use of (formal) models.
Compatible tracks: CSE, ATM

Track CSE - Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
Proposers: F. Amigoni
Topic: Multirobot Systems
Teams of cooperative robots can provide effective and efficient solutions for performing tasks in warehouse management, information gathering, search and rescue, and patrolling. Such multirobot systems present challenges in the development of decision-theoretic planning tools to accomplish the tasks with the appropriate level of autonomy.
Compatible tracks: CSE, ATM
Proposers: N. Gatti
Topic: Algorithmic Game Theory, Mechanism Design, and Multiagent Learning
This area, central in Artificial Intelligence, studies of the strategic interactions among agents, aiming at prescribing the best strategy for the players (Libratus), or at designing interaction mechanisms that are robust when agents are selfish and computationally efficient (kidney exchange), or at learning how to exploit the strategy of an agent that is not playing at the equilibrium.
Compatible tracks: CSE, ATM
Proposers: M. Restelli
Topic: Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning is a learning paradigm concerned with learning to control a system so as to maximize a numerical performance measure that expresses a long-term objective. Reinforcement learning is rapidly gaining attention both from academic and industrial communities due to recent successes in a variety of sequential decision-making problems.
Compatible tracks: CSE

Track CSE - Data, Web and Society
Proposers: Davide Martinenghi
Topic: Multi-objective optimization
The simultaneous optimization of different criteria is a problem naturally arising in Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, Caching, and many other scenarios involving massive amounts of data. This area targets the study of ranking algorithms and their hybridization with techniques used in the mentioned scenarios.
Compatible tracks: CSE
Proposers: Marco Masseroli
Topic: Bioinformatics
The Bioinformatics research area is focused on big life science data and information of different types increasingly available in many heterogeneous sources, and their best management, integration, mining and analysis with different machine learning techniques for knowledge discovery, to better understand complex biological phenomena.
Compatible tracks: BIO, CSE
Proposers: Rosario Michael Piro
Topic: Network medicine and pathway analysis
Network medicine studies molecular networks in human disease. Pathway analysis identifies processes which are altered, e.g., in cancer versus control. We will develop a new approach, based on network topology, to identify changes at different scales (small changes to a pathway-wide deregulation).
Compatible tracks: BIO, CSE

Track CSE - Information Systems
Proposers: C. Cappiello
Topic: Data Quality for Big Data Lakes
A data lake can be defined as a large data repository that stores heterogeneous sets of raw data in their native format. Data scientists can access the data lake to retrieve the data they need for their analyses. The thesis will focus on the definition of proper methods to support the Quality-based data selection to guarantee an efficient and effective data integration and analysis.
Compatible tracks: CSE
Proposers: B. Pernici
Topic: Information Systems - citizen science and data aggregation for SDGs
Citizen Science for Monitoring Climate Impacts and Achieving Climate Resilience: the thesis will focus on the use of social media and other non-traditional data sources for more effective monitoring of indicators for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by citizens, using data quality and machine learning techniques (link http://pernici.faculty.polimi.it/crowd4sdgpolimi/).
Compatible tracks: CSE, AUT, TLC
Proposers: M. Vitali
Topic: Energy Efficiency in Fog Computing
The research area focuses on sustainability of application management in Fog Computing, aiming at mitigating the environmental impact of applications deployed on distributed resources while ensuring their Quality of Service. The candidate will propose methodologies for improving the energy efficiency of distributed and heterogeneous systems with machine learning techniques.
Compatible tracks: CSE

Track CSE - System Architectures
Proposers: Giacomo Boracchi
Topic: Data-Driven Models for Non Matrix Data
Machine/Deep Learning models are very successful in inference problems over array inputs, like images. We will investigate ML models for performing inference on inputs that are not conveniently represented as arrays (like 3D meshes from CT scans or flow fields from CFD simulations) or for comparing data from paired but different modalities (like depth images vs CAD models or thermal images vs CFD)
Compatible tracks: CSE, TLC, BIO
Proposers: Luca Cassano
Topic: Dependability Solutions for Critical Infrastructures
The research area focuses on the design and development of methodologies and tools to support the design and deployment of dependable ICT for critical infrastructures. Tolerance, test and diagnosis of faults in the components of a critical infrastructure will be the target activities.
Compatible tracks: CSE, ELN, ELT, TLC.
Proposers: Fabrizio Ferrandi
Topic: High-Level Synthesis for FPGA-based Machine Learning
Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are currently designed and trained through high-level frameworks and they tiplically target multi-core CPUs, GPUs or fixed-function ML accelerators. The goal of this research project is to exploit High-Level Synthesis to implement ML algorithms on an alternative target, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), providing valuable efficiency tradeoffs.
Compatible tracks: CSE
Proposers: Antonio Miele
Topic: Design of Fault Management Strategies based on Machine Learning
The project exploits machine learning techniques to design advanced fault handling strategies tailored for selected classes of applications (e.g. image processing). The goal is to reduce the area/time/power overhead of traditional redundancy-based hardening and achieve an enhanced fault classification capability.
Compatible tracks: CSE, TLC, BIO.
Proposers: Gianluca Palermo
Topic: High Performance Virtual Screening for Drug Discovery in Urgent Computing Scenario
The project wants to find solutions to accelerate the virtual screening process in drug discovery. The project considers the urgent computing scenario, similar to COVID-19, where the computation has to rely on HPC resources. Possible research directions are on code optimization strategies, exploitation of heterogeneous resources (e.g. GPUs) or quantum computers, and machine learning techniques.
Compatible tracks: CSE
Proposers: Christian Pilato
Topic: AI-enabled big data analytics on heterogeneous platforms
This research area aims at developing on a holistic environment for accelerating big data analytics applications. These applications will execute on heterogeneous, distributed, scalable and secure computing systems and will be combined with AI algorithms for knowledge extraction and decision making.
Compatible tracks: CSE
Proposers: Manuel Roveri
Topic: Embedded and Edge AI
Technological progress in Internet-of-Things has opened the way to a pervasive presence of distributed intelligent applications in our everyday lives. The research will focus on Embedded and Edge AI for the on-the-device training and recall of machine/deep learning models taking into account the constraints on computation, memory, and energy characterizing the hardware platforms.
Compatible tracks: CSE
Proposers: Cristina Silvano
Topic: Architectures for Deep Neural Networks
In embedded systems, the computational requirements for DCNNs along with low-power and memory constraints require lot of attention, especially considering the use of HW-accelerators. This research area investigates the design space exploration of low-power accelerators for next generation DCNNs.
Compatible tracks: CSE
Proposers: Vittorio Zaccaria
Topic: Analysis and synthesis of side channel attacks against cryptographic systems
This project will focus on new methods and tools for analysing and synthesising attacks against a cryptographic system through a side-channel (either power consumption or induced hardware faults), extending recent techniques proposed in the literature.
Compatible tracks: CSE




Research topics in Electronics Engineering

Proposers: G. Bertuccio
Topic: Semiconductor Radiation Detectors and Integrated Circuits for Scientific Applications
Semiconductor Radiation Detectors (SRD) are widely employed in fundamental sciences and have numerous medical and industrial applications. The continuous increase in complexity and performance of new SRD require advances in Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) for signal readout and processing. The research activity can be directed through one of these two paths: 1) the theoretical and experimental study of the most advanced semiconductor radiation detectors in Silicon and in Compound Semiconductors (GaAs, CdTe, CdZnTe, SiC) or b) the design of low-noise and low-power CMOS ASIC for SRD. Both topics are oriented to applications toward Synchrotron X-ray sources and Space Telescopes for Astrophysics or to non-destructive material analysis in Industries. The research activities are made in collaboration with the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), the Italian Space Agency (ASI), the European Space Agency (ESA), Elettra Synchrotron in Trieste and some Companies.
Compatible tracks: ELN
Positions available: 1
Proposers: C. Guazzoni
Topic: Development of an innovative high-rate tagging system for radioactive beams
The activity proposed to the candidates frames in the upgrade of a research facility of INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare), at Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, in Catania (Italy) towards high-luminosity radioactive beams for nuclear physics experiments. Politecnico di Milano research staff, in collaboration with INFN, Sezione di Milano, Sezione di Catania and Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, is in charge of the development of a high-rate radiation-tolerant tagging system, equipped with a dedicated VLSI frontend. The research project will start January 2021 and lasts for at least three years, therefore has the adequate time span for a M.Sc. + PhD activity. The student will collaborate in the detector qualification, ASIC design and qualification, interconnection and mechanical assembly design and detection system modeling. Last but not least the student will take part in the beam tests, either in presence or in virtual connection, depending on the present situation. The students (up to 2) will have the possibility to shape the focus of the research activity according to their skills and interests and to work independently on different aspects of the project or jointly collaborate. The student will have the possibility to work in a real research lab, with hands-on approach combined with a strong theoretical background in the field of radiation detectors and low-noise frontend electronics, sharing the daily lab life with PhD students, junior and experienced researchers.
Compatible tracks: ELN
Positions available: 2
Proposers: C. Fiorini, M. Carminati
Topic: Development of innovative detection systems and readout ASICs for fundamental physics and medical imaging applications
The student will be involved in stimulating team activity carried out within international collaborations and concerning the development of innovative detection systems and readout ASICs to be used in experiments for both fundamental physics (nuclear physics, neutrinos search, X-ray astronomy..) and applied physics (analytical instrumentation for material analysis, industrial applications). Projects of the team regard also the development of sensors and electronics for medical imaging applications. During the program, the student will have the opportunity to contribute to the development of a broad range of components, circuits and systems, from radiation sensors, to low-noise integrated circuits, to data acquisition systems, to a complete instrument ans its use in the target application.
Compatible tracks: ELN
Positions available: 2
Proposers: A. Castoldi
Topic: Developement of novel Germanium Drift Detectors
The research activity is focused on the study and development of the first Germanium Drift Detector (GDD) that will represent a break-through in the field of imaging and spectroscopy of X- and gamma-rays. Germanium is one of the purest semiconductor crystals available today with excellent carrier transport properties and high detection efficiency of X and gamma rays that makes it the ideal candidate for such task. The design of novel 'drift' topologies, i.e. based on 3D shaping of the electric field inside the semiconductor volume, combined with the unique material properties has the potential of unprecedented low-noise performance on a wide energy range. The student will be collaborate in the development of the first prototypes of Germanium drift detectors and of the low-noise readout electronics and will participate in the conduction of their experimental characterization as well as in the analysis and interpretation of the data. The research activity is conducted in collaboration with international partners in the frame of the project DESIGN: European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), European X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL), LABEC Firenze.
Compatible tracks: ELN, BIO
Positions available: 1
Proposers: F. Villa, A. Tosi, F. Zappa
Topic: Microelectronics, devices, and electronic systems for 2D imaging and 3D ranging
1. "ELECTRON DEVICES: design, simulation, and fabrication of single-photon detectors in Si, InGaAs/InP and Ge". The research aims at conceiving new microelectronic sensors for detecting single photons in the 200nm-1,700nm range, with picosecond-timing precision. Different semiconductors (Si, Ge, InGaAs, InP, GaAs) and novel processing (planar, three-dimensional stacking, wafer-to-wafer bonding, vertically-grown micro-crystals) will be pioneered. Funding from European Commission “Horizon 2020” programmes, USA DARPA agency, national funds.
2. "MICROELECTRONICS: schematics, layout, fabrication and validation of ASIC chips for ststems-on-chips". The research aims at integrating detector arrays, in-pixel mixed-signal electronics and on-chip digital processing into one single chip, for imagers providing 2D movies at high (>100,000 frames/s) rates, single-photon sensitivity, and 3D (distance-resolved) maps of objects in a scene. Different microelectronic technologies (CMOS, BCD, and Si-Ge) and foundries will be exploited. Funding from “Horizon2020” EC programmes, NATO “Safety for Peace” programme, JPL-NASA agency.
3. "ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS: development and system integration of advanced electronic systems for sensing and imaging". The research aims at prototyping electronic products with FPGA, µC, and DSP devices, for different applications (e.g., time-of-flight 3D automotive vision, quantum optics experiments, quantum computing chips, non-invasive biomedical parameter acquisitions). Various methodologies, hw/fw/sw co-partitions, devices (Xilinx, Altera, ARM-Cortex) and high-level languages will be exploited. Funding from JPL-NASA agency, European Southern Observatory, and European Space Agency).
Compatible tracks: ELN
Positions available: 3
Proposers: A. Gulinatti, I. Rech
Topic: Single-photon detectors and applications
Recently, the field of single-photon detection has experienced an exponential growth due to the emergence of a large number of scientific and industrial applications that require the capability of detecting the light down to the single-photon level. Among them are laser ranging, single-molecules analysis, and optical quantum computing, which are regarded as key enabling technologies to address some of today?s most challenging problems like the development of new drugs, the study of climatic changes and the autonomous driving. The Single-Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) has emerged as the detector of choice for these applications thanks to its remarkable performance. However, many progresses are still needed to bring these applications in everyday life. The research activity is aimed at addressing these limitations by developing innovative solutions for the detection of single photons with unprecedented capabilities in terms of photon detections efficiency, timing jitter, spectral sensitivity, and integrability into large arrays of detectors. The activity will involve one or more of these fields: design and simulation of new detector structures, study and modeling of unexplored detector properties, development of new experimental characterization techniques, design of new front-end circuitry, development of application specific architectures.
Compatible tracks: ELN
Positions available: 2
Proposers: D. Ielmini, C. Monzio Compagnoni, A.S. Spinelli
Topic: Emerging memory devices and in-memory computing
The future evolution of integrated electronic technologies will see a closer interaction of logic and memory devices, overcoming the traditional design schemes in the attempt to constantly reduce power consumptions and improve system performance. This is today triggering the research both on new, fast and energy-efficient memory devices that could be integrated directly in logic processes and on new computational forms that could be directly performed inside memory arrays. The proposed projects for the Honours Program will make contributions to these two research lines. In the former, activities will be focused on the experimental, numerical and theoretical investigation of the basic physics, the working principles and the performance of emerging memory devices, such as nanoscale ferroelectric memories and magnetoresistive memories. In the second, in-memory computing will be investigated both theoretically and experimentally, focusing on hardware neuromorphic systems exploiting different types of memory arrays, e.g., floating-gate, resistive and phase-change arrays, as artificial synaptic arrays. The results of the projects will pave the way to the future evolution of micro and nanoelectronics.
Compatible tracks: ELN
Positions available: 3
Proposers: G. Ferrari
Topic: Innovative Integrated Instrumentation for Nanoscience
The constant scaling down of the devices poses many challenges to their characterization due to the corresponding reduction of the electrical signals, in many cases down to femtoAmpere currents and sub-attoFarad capacitances. The sensitivity required to the electronic instrumentation can be obtained by co-design the device and the reading electronics, ideally merging into a single miniaturized integrated device thus optimizing their coupling. This same approach also paves the way to the design of innovative sensors that profit of the reduced physical size to reach high spatial resolution or the detection of few molecules or electrons. The group is involved in different projects requiring the design of such custom electronic instruments and smart sensors, for example: i) the European project TRAINING4CRM (http://www.training4crm.eu/) having the objective to develop an integrated system able to detect the release of neurotransmitters of optically stimulated neurons; ii) the ASI project QUASIX focused on the design of cryogenic circuits in CMOS technology to investigate single-atom based devices for quantum silicon communications in space
Compatible tracks: ELN,BIO
Positions available: 1
Proposers: D. Natali
Topic: Plastic Electronics
Organic semiconductors are carbon-based compounds that can be conveniently processed from solution at almost room temperature. As a consequence, it is possible to manufacture devices, circuits and systems by means of non-lithographic techniques, such as inkjet printing, screen printing, flexography to cite but a few. The benefits of printed electronics include: low cost, mechanical flexibility, ease of production and integration, and the possibility of addressing a variety of non-conventional applications: flexible displays, image sensors, bio-sensors, smart labels, RF-ID tags, edible electronics, wearable electronics, and more. The research encompasses all the aspects, issues and challenges of plastic electronics: the fundamentals of charge carrier transport related to the energetically disordered landscape sampled by carriers; device modeling and simulation through innovative ad-hoc developed code; printing process engineering; logic, analog, optoelectronic circuits and systems design, realization and characterization.
Compatible tracks: ELN, BIO
Positions available: 1
Proposers: M. Sampietro
Topic: Smart sensor systems for silicon photonics and optical processors
Photonic technologies have since long dreamed of non-invasive monitoring tools to inspect the light inside optical waveguides. By exploiting photon interaction with intra-gap energy states localized at the waveguide surface, we demonstrate that light intensity can be monitored by measuring the electric conductance of the silicon waveguide through a capacitive access to the waveguide via the SiO cladding. This approach realizes a ContactLess Integrated Photonic Probe (CLIPP), that is simple, inherently CMOS compatible, noninvasive and scalable to hundreds of probing points per chip. Light monitoring with a sensitivity of -30 dBm and a dynamic range of 40 dB is demonstrated in waveguides and high-Q resonators, and for the tuning of coupled-resonator optical filters. The CLIPP concept has been demonstrated on both silicon (Si) and indium phosphide (InP) photonic platforms, and has been utilized in several different applications, including for instance automatic fiber-to-waveguide alignment, wavelength tuning and stabilization of micro-ring resonators (MRRs) , light-path tracking and feedback-control of switch fabrics. The Thesis will develop all the electronics to read the CLIPP sensors and to feedback control the operating point of the many optical devices in a Photonic chip. The group is now involved in the European Project STREAMS (http://ict-streams.eu/ ) having the overall objective to develop the necessary Silicon Photonics Transceiver and Routing technologies towards a new, power efficient, WDM-based, Tb/s, optical on-board interconnection paradigm that enables multiple high bandwidth, point-to-point direct links on the board level, as a step forward to the realization of multi-socket server blades technology. The elected student will participate to this high level project.
Compatible tracks: ELN,BIO
Positions available: 1




Research topics in Telecommunication Engineering

Proposers: Maurizio Magarini
Topic: Advanced Modulation Formats for 5G Cellular Vehicular-to-Everything (V2X) Communication
The research will investigate the performance of new waveforms and coding techniques suitable for 5G Cellular V2X systems. In such a context, there is the needed to cope with a high degree of heterogeneity in terms of services and requirements. Specially, V2X use cases require ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC) for the transmission of short packets under harsh channel conditions. Several waveform candidates, i.e. OFDM, DFT-s-OFDM, GFDM, and OTFS, will be considered in conjunction with advanced coding schemes (turbo, low-density parity-check (LDPC) and polar) under a common framework. The performance will be evaluated considering a realistic V2X scenario.
Compatible tracks: TLC,ELT
Positions available: 1
Proposers: Matteo Cesana
Topic: Can a network learn?
6G networks are foreseen to embed machine learning techniques in network management procedures to augment network performance and match Quality of Service requirements for the end users. The research will mainly focus on the application of machine learning tools to real data traces obtained from mobile radio networks and Internet of Things systems to extract knowledge which then will be leveraged to optimize networks' operations,
Compatible tracks: TLC, INF
Positions available: 1