Dipartimento di Informatica, Bioingegneria, Robotica e Ingegneria dei Sistemi

Short biography

Born March 14, 1938 in Vercelli (Piemonte, Italy)

Married with Marisa – One daughter: Michela

Education

Maturità classica 1956, Liceo-Ginnasio Lagrangia, Vercelli (Lagrangia is the Italian family name of  Joseph-Louis Lagrange)

Laurea (cum laude) in Physics October 31, 1960, University of Genova

Libera Docenza in Theoretical Physics, 1968.

Academic career

From November 1, 1961 to October 31, 1963 fellowship of INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare), Università di Genova

From November 1, 1964 to October 31, 1965 lecturer of a class of Physics for students in Engineering (Thermodynamics and Electromagnetism), Università di Genova

From November 1, 1965 to February 28, 1968 research assistant Institut fuer Theoretiche Kernphysic, director Prof. Konrad Bleuler, University of Bonn

From March 1, 1968 to April 30, 1968, visiting researcher Ecole Polytechnique, prof. Jean Lascoux, Paris

From May 1, 1968 to October 31, 1968 , visiting researcher Service de Physique, Prof. J. Géhéniau and J. Regnier, Université Libre de Bruxelles

From November 1,1968 to October 31, 1970 lecturer of a class of Physics for students in Engineering, Università di Genova

From November 1, 1970 to October 31, 1980 lecturer of a class of Mathematical Methods of Physics for students in Physics, and also Assistant professor in Physics, Università di Genova

From November 1, 1980 to October 31, 1994 full professor in Mathematical Analysis, University of Genova

From November 1, 1994 to October 31, 2010 full professor in Computer and Information Science with the same University.

Retired November 1, 2010 and subsequently scientific collaborator first of DISI (Dipartimento di Informatica e Scienze dell0Informazione) and next of DIBRIS (Dipartimento di Informatica, Bioingegneria, Robotica e Ingegneria dei Sistemi).

The journal "INVERSE PROBLEMS"

Member of the Editorial Board of the journal, published by the Institute of Physics, from the foundation in 1985 to 1989.

Editor-in-chief, at that time called Honorary editor, from 1990 to 1994.

Member of the International Advisory Panel from 1995 to now

Fellow of the Institute of Physics, FInstP, 2004.

Conference organization

Chairman of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on "Inverse Problems in Scattering and Imaging", held in Cape Code, USA, 14-19 April 1991.

Chairman of  the International Conference on Inverse Problems, sponsored by the Italian Research Council (CNR), held in Vietri, Italy, 28 September-2 October 1998.

Promoter and member of the steering committe of the conference series Applied Inverse Problems

Research

Author and co-author of about 180 articles, co-editor, with E.R.Pike, of the book "Inverse Problem in Scattering and Imaging" and co-author with P.Boccacci of the book "Introduction to Inverse Problems in Imaging".

My first research interests were in non-relativistic quantum scattering theory. In particular I worked on Regge pole theory and on its applications to nuclear physics, on spectral properties of Schroedinger operators with nonlocal potentials and on some mathematical problems arising in the optical model of nuclear reactions. Around 1975 my interest was addressed to another research domain which was new at that time: the theory and the applications of inverse and ill-posed problems. After some preliminary work on deterministic and probabilistic regularization methods and on their applications to the problem of object restoration in optics, I developed methods based on the singular value decomposition of a linear operator for the solution of inverse problems in various domains of applied science. In particular, properties of the singular system of the finite Laplace transform were derived and used for data inversion in the problem of polydispersity analysis by means of photon correlation spectroscopy. Moreover, applications of the theory to imaging problems in microscopy suggested a new version of the confocal scanning microscope. A prototype of this new microscope was realized by E.R.Pike at King's College in London. Other applications were to particle sizing in the micron and submicron region by light scattering, to microwave thermography, seismic tomography and astrophysics. Subsequent research interests were in problems of image restoration in infrared astronomy, in microscopy and in medical imaging, including SPECT imaging and chirp-pulse microwave computed tomography. Presently I am working on the application of efficient optimization methods to large scale inverse problems with data affected by the so-called Poisson noise, namely the noise due to fluctuations in photon counting.

Member of Accademia Ligure di Scienze ed Arti.

Individual member of SIAM (Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics), UMI (the Italian Mathematical Society), SIMAI (the Italian Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics) and SIF (the Italian Physical Society). .