Invited Speakers

Alberto Leva


Department of information and electronics
Politecnico di Milano





Alberto Leva received the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering in 1989 at the Politecnico di Milano, where he is at present associate professor of Automatic Control. His main research interest concern methods and tools for the automatic tuning of industrial controllers, process modelling, simulation and control, particularly within the object-oriented paradigm, and control education. In the last years, he has been concentrating on control-based design of computing systems, addressing in a system- and control-theoretical manner problems like scheduling, resource allocation, time synchronisation, thermal and power/performance management, and service composition. Alberto Leva is author or co-quthor of around 200 publications in peer-reviewed international journals and conferences.



Computing systems and the network as a control education arena


Computers and the network are widely used and studied as a means to provide control education. However, they also offer a wide variety of problems to teach control. The talk concentrates on the second aspect. First the topics of control and control-based design of computing systems are discussed from the scientific and engineering viewpoint. This evidences on one hand their interest, and on the other hand the strong opportunity of providing the described education to both control and computer engineers. The focus then moves to the pedagogical side of the matter, showing how many concepts - ranging from control structures through cyber-physical systems to process/control co-design and more - can be exemplified and experimented with, both in simulation and on real systems that virtually any student already possesses. Some relevant examples, taken from past experience, are described to support the presented ideas. The talk ends with a round-up of the envisaged didactic activities, and a brief sketch of future perspectives.