Mauro Tortonesi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Mauro Tortonesi graduated in Electronic Engineering at the University of Ferrara on 25 October 2002 with the thesis “Il problema della mobilità nella rete Internet” (“The problem of mobility in the Internet”), reporting a score of 110 /110 cum laude, and receiving a letter of commendation by the graduation commission.

In November 2002 he won the competition for admission to the Ph.D. programme in Engineering Sciences at the Department of Engineering of the University of Ferrara.

He passed the Italian qualification for practicing the engineering profession in the first examination session of 2003.

In the September 2004 – August 2005 period, he moved to Pensacola, Florida (USA) as a visiting scientist at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC), joining the NOMADS research team led by Dr. Niranjan Suri.

In February 2006 he won the competition for the research grant “Infrastructure middleware for distributed provisioning of Web services in the presence of mobility and ad-hoc networks” at the Department of Engineering of the University of Ferrara, a post-doctoral research position he held until March 2009.

On 23 March 2006 he received a Ph.D. in Engineering, defending a thesis entitled “Multimedia Service Provisioning on the Wireless Networks” (supervisor Prof. C. Stefanelli).

In April 2009 he got a 12-month scholarship within an applied research, pre-competitive development and technology transfer projects funded by the Spinner Consortium of the Emilia-Romagna Region within the European Social Fund (ESF), Axis IV, Human Capital, Objective 2. During this period, Dr. Tortonesi oversaw the study, design and implementation of the Teorema e-Maintenance platform for the remote control and assistance of the ice cream making machines manufactured by Carpigiani Group, the world leading industry in the ice cream making machines market. The Spinner-funded project ended on 5 April 2010, producing very considerable results from the business point of view. In fact, the project managed to produce a very robust and effective e-Maintenance platform, which was immediately commercialized and is currently being used to monitor and maintain almost 5000 Carpigiani ice cream making machines operating in more than 20 countries across the entire world. The Teorema e-Maintenance platform allowed Carpigiani to reduce by 25% the cost of its after-sales services. The collaboration between Carpigiani and the Distributed Systems Research Group at the Department of Engineering of the University of Ferrara, continues to the present day and has produced interesting results even from the scientific point of view, as evidenced by several publications in international scholarly journals and conferences.

From 1 September 2010, Mauro Tortonesi is an Assistant Professor (“Ricercatore a Tempo Determinato” – RTD) at the Department of Engineering of the University of Ferrara, after winning the competition for a position opened within the project for the construction of the Technopole of Ferrara, started on 1 January 2010 and regulated by the Convention for the implementation of Activity I.1.1 ROP ERDF 2007-2013 “Creation of Technopoles for Industrial Research and Technological Transfer” stipulated by the Emilia-Romagna Region and the University of Ferrara. The scientific project associated to the RTD position is specifically focused on advanced applied research within industrial environments in IT and advanced mechatronics, operated from the CenTec research laboratory, the branch located in the industrial district of Cento (Ferrara) of the MechLav (Laboratory for Advanced Mechanics) laboratory of the Technopole of Ferrara. The excellent results achieved, both in terms of scientific production and of technology transfer, led to Dr. Tortonesi’s RTD position being renewed for 3 years starting from 1 September 2013.

On January 2015, he received the “Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale – II fascia”, the national scientific qualification to practice as an Associate Professor in Computer Engineering (9/H1) in Italian universities.

In the July 2015 – September 2015 period, he moved to Adelphi, Maryland (USA) as a visiting scientist at the Adelphi Lab Center of the United States Army Research Lab, joining the Battlefield Information Processing (BIP) branch of the Information Sciences Division (ISD), Computational and Information Sciences Directorate (CISD).

From 1 September 2016, Mauro Tortonesi is an Assistant Professor on tenure track (“Ricercatore a Tempo Determinato, lettera B”) at the Department of Engineering of the University of Ferrara.

From 1 December 2018, Mauro Tortonesi is an Assistant Professor on tenure track (“Ricercatore a Tempo Determinato, lettera B”) at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Ferrara.

From 1 September 2019, Mauro Tortonesi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Ferrara.

Mauro Tortonesi’s scientific work could be broadly classified along the following 4 main research activities.

A first activity involves the study of solutions for the modeling and optimization of support organizations for the resolution of incidents in the IT industry, and the construction of models and software tools to support business-driven strategic decision making relating to the incident management process in the IT industry. This is an extremely difficult task, which requires to consider a large set of possible operations on IT support organizations (support group re-staffing, merging, splitting, etc.), and the implementation of different policies for the allocation and prioritization of incidents, and suggests the adoption of what-if scenario analysis techniques and tools, which enable the behavioral analysis of highly complex real-world systems in alternative working conditions. This activity, carried out in collaboration with the HP Labs research laboratories in Palo Alto, CA (USA), the research division of Hewlett Packard, resulted in numerous scientific publications and in the realization of the state-of-the-art SYMIAN decision support tool, which was thoroughly validated through comparisons with the data from real-life enterprise class IT support organizations, and was recently released as Open Source.

A second research activity concerns Internet-of-Things (IoT) management in industrial environments. More specifically, Dr. Tortonesi’s work focused on the study and implementation of Web-based and highly scalable e-Maintenance solutions for the remote monitoring, diagnostics, configuration, reporting, and updating of automated machines, and on the study and implementation of innovative control platforms for automated machines based on single board computer with ARM processors and component-off- the-shelf Open Source software, such as the Linux operating system, the Qt embedded GUI libraries, and the Ruby on Rails framework for Web 2.0 applications. This activity is carried out in collaboration with the R&D divisions of many world leading (mechanical) industries, such as Carpigiani Group of Anzola dell’Emilia (BO), IMA SpA of Ozzano Emilia (BO), VM Motori (FIAT-Chrysler Group) of Cento (FE), Elenos of Poggio Renatico (FE), SACMI of Imola (BO). Within this research activity, Dr. Tortonesi contributed to design and realize several prototypes of software solutions for the remote monitoring and control of machines through Web-based technologies, for the the local (HMI) control of machines through an embedded Qt interface, and for the remote control of automated machines via iPad devices. All the prototypes are currently going through the commercialization phase, and provided or are expected to provide very significant economic benefits for the companies. The activity also led to several scientific publications and to the filing of two patent applications.

Another research activity concerns the study of business-driven methodologies for the placement optimization of software components of complex IT services in federated Cloud environments. This activity aims at developing a general model to represent the behaviour of complex IT services with multiple workflows, a simulation based tool to reenact the behavior of complex IT services in federated Cloud environments, and optimization solutions leveraging computational intelligence methods such as genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization. This activity is carried out in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science – Science and Engineering (DISI) of the University of Bologna, St. John’s University in New York, NY, (USA), and the IBM TJ Watson research institute, New York, NY, (USA). The activity, started only very recently, resulted in several publications and in the realization of the SISFC simulator to reenact the behavior of IT service components in federated Cloud environments and of the ruby-mhl library of metaheuristics, which were released as Open Source.

A fourth research activity involves the study and development of methodologies and tools to support communications in extremely dynamic wireless environments such as mobile ad-hoc, delay-tolerant, opportunistic, and tactical edge networks. The main objective of this activity is the implementation of a comprehensive middleware solution enabling application-level service discovery, network condition monitoring, service session mobility, QoS management, opportunistic resource exploitation, adaptation of component-off-the-shelf applications, and finally smart and adaptive information dissemination. This activity is carried out in collaboration with the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition in Pensacola, FL (USA), with the United States Army Research Lab (ARL), with the United States Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), with the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), and the United States Office of Naval Research (ONR), and led to interesting results published in many international scientific journals and conferences.

Finally, other minor activities concern the realization of a platform for the QoS-enabled provisioning of multimedia services over Bluetooth, the development of mechanisms to prevent the tracking of users and mobile devices with Wireless Internet, and the study of the problem of porting applications and services legacy IPv4-only to IPv6.