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Ph.D. Programs 2011 call (XXVI cycle)

Ph.D. Program in Computer Science and Engineering / CSE

The doctoral program aims at preparing researchers and professionals with a wide knowledge about the foundations of informatics and information engineering, and about their application to a variety of systems in many different domains. The program introduces new perspectives in formulating and solving technical challenges that are currently a target of very active research areas. The research activity focuses on key aspects of informatics and information engineering such as open-endedness, dynamics and control, autonomy, security, concurrency, cost-effectiveness, quality of services, dependability, optimization, and is concerned especially with the application to networked and large-scale systems with high degrees of interaction.

The PhD students enrolled in the program work within the following research units:

  • SYStem Modelling and Analysis (SYSMA), lead by Prof. Rocco De Nicola, whose research is focused on concurrent (distributed, mobile, autonomic) systems modelling and analysis.
  • DYnamical Systems, Control, and Optimization (DYSCO), lead by Prof. Alberto Bemporad, whose main research activities are in the area of model predictive control of dynamical systems and of its applications to automotive, aerospace, financial, and energy systems.
  • Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (PRIAn), lead by Prof. Angelo Bifone, investigates techniques to identify complex patterns in large data sets, such as in biological and medical images, in close collaboration with experimentalists.

The PhD students enrolled in the CSE program also have the option of following a joint doctoral track with the PhD program in Economics, Markets, and Institutions (EMI), developing multi-disciplinary methods, theories, and techniques for the analysis of vast amount of data and of complex interactions between society and information technologies, and for creating innovative services, improving the quality of life, and enabling people and businesses to make better decisions.

Coordinator
People who held Lectures and Seminars at IMT
Rocco De Nicola
IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca - Lucca
PEOPLE who have held Lectures

Giuseppe Anastasi, Università di Pisa
Marco Avvenuti, Università di Pisa
Alberto Bartoli, Università degli Studi di Trieste
Cinzia Bernardeschi, Università di Pisa
Roberto Bruni, Università di Pisa
Gerardo Canfora, Università degli Studi del Sannio
Stefano Caselli, Università degli Studi di Parma
Gianni Conte, Università degli Studi di Parma
Gianluca Dini, Università di Pisa
Paolo Ferragina, Università di Pisa
Gianluigi Ferrari, Università di Pisa
Giorgio Ghelli, Università di Pisa
Stefania Gnesi, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Pisa
Roberto Grossi, Università di Pisa
Paola Inverardi, Università degli Studi dell'Aquila
Beatrice Lazzerini, Università di Pisa
Maurizio Lenzerini, Università degli Studi di Roma - La Sapienza
Fabrizio Luccio, Università di Pisa
Marco Luise, Università di Pisa
José Meseguer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States of America
Michela Meo, Politecnico di Torino
Enzo Mingozzi, Università di Pisa
Romualdo Pastor Satorras, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Dusko Pavlovic, University of London
Witold Pedrycz, University of Alberta
Domenico Saccà, Università della Calabria
Vladimiro Sassone, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Martin Wirsing, Ludwig Maximilians Universität München
Patt Yale, University of Texas, Austin


PEOPLE who have held Seminars

Lucia Acciai, Università degli Studi di Firenze
Alessandro Aladini, Università degli Studi di Urbino
Leonardo Badia, Università degli Studi di Ferrara
Christel Baier, Ube Frontier College
Massimo Bartoletti, Università degli Studi di Cagliari
Simona Bernardi, Università di Torino
Marco Bernardo, Università degli Studi di Urbino
Chiara Bodei, Università di Pisa
Michele Boreale, Università degli Studi di Firenze
Mario Bravetti, Università di Bologna
Roberto Bruni, Università di Pisa
Federico Buti, Università degli Studi di Camerino
Luis Caires, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Claudio Cicconetti, Università di Pisa
Michele Colajanni, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Giovanni Colombo, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella
Mario Coppo, Università di Torino
Vittorio Cortellessa, Università degli Studi dell'Aquila
Liliana D'Errico, Università degli Studi di Urbino
Mariangiola Dezani, Università di Torino
Maria Rita Di Berardini, Università degli Studi di Camerino
Massimo Egidi, Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali "Guido Carli"
Michele Flammini, Università degli Studi dell'Aquila
Horst Friedrich, Wedde Technische Universität Dortmund
E. Giachino, Università di Torino
Fausto Giunchiglia, Università degli Studi di Trento
Marco Giunti, Universidade de Lisboa
Holger Hermanns, Saarland University Saarbrücken
Kohei Honda Queen Mary, University of London
Magnus Johansson, Uppsala University - Department of Information Technology
Ivan Lanese , Università di Bologna
Diego Latella, Università degli studi di Firenze
Michele Loreti, Università degli studi di Firenze
Zohar Manna, Stanford University
Massimo Merro, Università degli Studi di Verona
Marco Ajmone Marsan, Politecnico di Torino
Barend Mons, University Medical Centre Rotterdam
Andrea Passarella, IIT/CNR Pisa
Romualdo Pastor - Satorras, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya Barcelona
Alfonso Pierantonio, Università degli Studi dell'Aquila
Luciano Pietronero, Università degli Studi di Roma - La Sapienza
Marco Pistore, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Mohapatra Prasant, University of California
Corrado Priami, Università degli Studi di Trento
Rosario Pugliese, Università degli Studi di Firenze
Paola Quaglia, Università degli Studi di Trento
Antonio Ravara, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Izhak Rubin, University of California
Joseph Sifakis, Verimag Laboratory
Dan Stefanescu, Suffolk University
Luca Tesei, Università degli Studi di Camerino
Vasco Thudichum Vasconcelos, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Francesco Tiezzi, Università degli Studi di Firenze
Paolo Traverso, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Mirco Tribastone, Ludwig Maximilians Universität München
Don Towsley University of Massachusetts
Angelo Troina, Università di Torino
Catia Trubiani, Università degli Studi dell'Aquila
Emilio Tuosto, University of Leicester
Enrico Vicario, Università degli Studi di Firenze
Hugo Viera, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Nobuko Yoshida, Imperial College London
Gianluigi Zavattaro, Università di Bologna
Roberto Zunino, Università degli Studi di Trento
Scientific Board
Luca Aceto
Háskólinn í Reykjavík - Reykjavik

Marco Ajmone Marsan
Politecnico di Torino - Torino

Alberto Bemporad
IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca - Lucca

Paolo Ciancarini
Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna - Bologna

Fabio Schoen
Università degli Studi di Firenze - Firenze
Upcoming Seminars and Events
From May 17, 2012, 14:30 To 16:00, San Micheletto − Classroom 2
Lexicographic orderings
Each countable linear ordering may be represented as the lexicographic ordering of a language over some alphabet. But which linear orderings can be represented by regular, context-free, or deterministic context-free languages? Can we decide whether the lexicographic ordering of a regular or (deterministic) context-free language is a well-ordering, or a scattered linear ordering, or a dense ordering? Do these linear orderings have decidable first-order or monadic second-order theories? Is it decidable whether the lexicographic orderings of two given regular or context-free languages are isomorphic? In the talk I will present answers to the above questions.
  • Zoltan Esik
    Szegedi Tudományegyetem
From May 17, 2012, 16:00 To 17:30, San Micheletto − Classroom 6
Developmental Agents for Vision
In this talk, I introduce the notion of developmental agents, that are based on the theory of “learning from constraints” (see e.g. http://videolectures.net/marco_gori/). It is claimed that in most interesting tasks, learning from constraints naturally leads to “deep architectures”, that emerge when following the developmental principle of focusing attention on “easy constraints”, at each stage. Interestingly, this suggests that stage-based learning, as discussed in developmental psychology, might not be primarily the outcome of biology, but it could be instead the consequence of optimization principles and complexity issues that hold regardless of the “body.” In the second part of the talk, I give insights on the adoption of the proposed framework in computer vision. The proposed functional approach leads naturally to develop different notions of features, the lower level of which are somehow related to classical SIFT. It is pointed out that the adoption of information-theoretic principles are at the basis of the feature generation either at low or high level of the vision computer hierarchy. The functions that are developed are inherently independent of roto-translations and do acquire scale invariance by the minimization of an appropriate entropy-based measure, that is also at the basis of the focus of attention. Finally, I give an overview of different constraints emerging at different layers of the hierarchy, and claim that the overall system is expected to work in any visual environment by acting continuously, with no separation between learning and scene interpretation.
  • Marco Gori
    Università degli Studi di Siena
From May 23, 2012, 16:00 To 17:30, Ex Boccherini − Conference Room
Generation of test data structures using Constraint Logic Programming
The goal of Bounded-Exhaustive Testing (BET) is the automatic generation of all the test cases satisfying a given invariant, within a given bound. When the input has a complex structure, the development of correct and efficient generators becomes a very challenging task. In this talk we show how to use Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) to systematically develop generators of structurally complex test data. Similarly to filtering-based test generation, we follow a declarative approach which allows us to separate the issue of(i)~defining the test structure and invariant, from that of (ii)~generating admissible test input instances. This separation helps improve the correctness of the developed test case generators. However, in contrast with filtering approaches, we rely on a symbolic representation and we take advantage of efficient search strategies provided by CLP systems for generating test instances. Through some experiments on examples taken from the literature on BET, we show that CLP, by combining the use of constraints and recursion, allows one to write intuitive and easily understandable test generators. We also show that these generators can be much more efficient than those built using ad-hoc filtering-based test generation tools like Korat.
  • Valerio Senni
    Università degli Studi di Roma - Tor Vergata
From May 23, 2012, 17:30 To 19:00, Ex Boccherini − Conference Room
Adventures in Interval Temporal Logics
Temporal reasoning plays a main role in many areas of computer science and artificial intelligence. In most cases, time points are assumed to be the basic ontological temporal entities. However, they are not suitable to properly reason about real-world events with an intrinsic duration. During this talk, we explore a different approach to temporal reasoning, based on the notion of time interval. The family of Interval Temporal Logics (ITL), including logical formalisms supporting interval-based temporal reasoning, is introduced, with a look at the philosophical and practical reasons behind its relvance for temporal reasoning. We summarize the problems that have been addressed in the last decade, with a special focus on satisfiability and expressiveness issues, and outline future research direction
  • Dario Della Monica
    Háskólinn í Reykjavík
From May 30, 2012, 16:00 To 17:30, Ex Boccherini − Conference Room
Algebraic Synchronization Trees and Processes
The study of recursive program schemes is one of the classic topics in programming language semantics. One of the main goals of this line of research is to define the semantics of systems of recursive equations such as F(n) = if iszero(n) then 1 else n * F(n-1). In this talk, I will consider recursion schemes from a process-algebraic perspective and view them as a way of defining synchronization trees. In particular, I will investigate the relative expressive power of regular and algebraic recursion schemes over two signatures, which are based on those for Basic CCS and Basic Process Algebra, as a means for defining synchronization trees up to isomorphism as well as modulo bisimilarity and language equivalence. Amongst other results, I will present a generalization of a celebrated result by Bergstra and Klop to the effect that the process describing the behaviour of a bag over a two element data set is not definable in BPA with recursive definitions. I will also compare the expressiveness of algebraic recursion schemes to that of the low levels in the classic Caucal hierarchy of infinite graphs. The talk is based on joint work with Arnaud Carayol (LIGM, Universite' Paris-Est, CNRS, France), Zoltan Esik (Institute of Informatics, University of Szeged, Hungary) and Anna Ingolfsdottir ((ICE-TCS, School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University, Iceland). This work will be presented at ICALP 2012. The extended abstract is available at http://www.ru.is/faculty/luca/PAPERS/algsynchICALPfinal.pdf
  • Luca Aceto
    Háskólinn í Reykjavík
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