Maria Prandini

Biography

Maria Prandini was born in Brescia, Italy, on September 8, 1969. She received the Laurea degree cum laude in Electrical Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano (1994), and the Ph.D. degree in Information Technology from the Universita degli Studi di Brescia (1998). After her Ph.D. studies, she was a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Electronics Research Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, from 1998 to 2000. She also held visiting positions at Delft University of Technology (1998), Cambridge University (2000), University of California, Berkeley (2005), and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (2006).

From December 2002 to January 2011, she was Assistant Professor at the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione of the Politecnico di Milano. From February 2011 to February 2018, she was Associate Professor at the same department, which is now named Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, where she is currently Full Professor.

Her research interests include randomized methods for system analysis and design; modeling, verification and control of stochastic and hybrid systems; and multi-agent systems, involving distributed optimization and game theoretic solutions for cooperative and noncooperative decision making. Her research studies were motivated mainly by applications to the transportation and energy domains.

Since 1999, she has been teaching courses in control at the undergraduate and graduate levels, in Italy as well as at international institutions abroad. In particular, she was a lecturer of a Ph.D. course on Stochastic Systems: Estimation and Control at the University of California, Berkeley (spring 1999), a master course on Hybrid systems at the University of Stuttgart (first semester 2014-15), and a Ph.D course on Hybrid systems at Lund University (October 2015). She is a lecturer of a master course on Nonlinear control at her institution, where she has also been teaching advanced courses for Ph.D. students on Hybrid Systems and Cooperative and Noncooperative Optimization and Control.

She is currently Chair of the Automation and Control Engineering Program at Politecnico di Milano.

She was the principal investigator in the EC-funded H2020 project UnCoVerCPS \Unifying Control and Verification of Cyber-Physical Systems" (2015{2018), being responsible for the scientific activities of the PoliMi team, which include the development of distributed optimization techniques for networked systems. Previously, she contributed to EC-funded projects on modeling, verification and control of stochastic and hybrid systems with application to the energy and transportation domains. More specifically, she was workpackage leader in the FP5 project HYBRIDGE \Distributed control and stochastic analysis of hybrid systems, supporting safety-critical real-time systems design" (2002{2005), and principal investigator in the FP6 project iFly \Safety, Complexity and Responsibility based design and validation of highly automated Air Trac Management" (2007{2011) and in the FP7 project MoVeS \Modelling, verification and control of complex systems: From foundations to power network applications" (2010-2013).

She has been a member of the editorial boards of leading journals in control as an associate editor (IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2009-2013, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, 2009-2015, and Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems, 2011-2015) and as a discussion editor (European Journal of Control, 2007-2013). She is a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) Conference Editorial Board (since 2007) and of the European Control Association (EUCA) Conference Editorial Board (since 2013) as an associate editor. She is currently associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems. She has been active in the IEEE CSS and the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). She is a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Discrete Event and Hybrid Systems (since 2008). She has been appointed member of the IFAC Policy Committee for the term 2017-2020. She has been contributing to the activities and governance of the IEEE CSS in different roles. From 2013 to 2015, she was editor for the CSS Electronic Publications. She was elected member of the IEEE CSS Board of Governors for a three-year term (2015-2017). She was IEEE CSS Vice-President for Conference Activities in 2016 and 2017. She has been an elected member of the CSS nominating committee for the year 2018.

She is currently a member of SIGBED Board of Directors.

She has been a member of the program committees of several international conferences and either organizing or contributing to invited sessions, workshops, and tutorials. She was co-chair of the 21st ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC 2018).

Currently, she is co-program chair of IEEE Conference on Decisione and Control 2020 and program chair of IEEE Conference on Decisione and Control 2021.

In 2018, she received the IEEE CSS Distinguished Member Award for contributions to stochastic, hybrid, and distributed control systems and outstanding service to the Control Systems Society related to electronic publications and conference activities.

In 2019 she was elevated to IEEE Fellow, effective 1 January 2020, with the following citation: “for contributions to stochastic, hybrid and distributed control systems theory.”