- Year of nomination: 2009
- Facility: Department of Electronics and Information [facility name no longer in use]
"Renato Stefanelli has been part of Politecnico di Milano's teaching staff (Faculty of Engineering) since 1958. He obtained a teaching degree in Calculators and Circuit Logic in 1964, became Aggregate Professor of Applied Electronics in 1969 and was Full Professor from 1973, first in Applied Electronics, then in Information Processing Machines and finally in Electronic Computing. He became untenured in 2004 and retired in 2007.
During his long and energetic teaching work he held courses mainly for students in the Information sector, but not only: for many years he actually held a course for aeronautical students. He also dedicated considerable effort to starting new educational initiatives, in particular the creation of Special Purposes Schools then the development of University Diplomas (he dedicated himself to these activities particularly at the Cremona Campus); prior to this, he had also been involved in the launch of the Faculty of Engineering in Pavia.
His extensive scientific activity, documented by over 160 publications (most of which articles in journals and conference proceedings at an international level), mainly took place in the fields of image processing (he was among the first Italian scholars to deal with this sector; he dealt with both theoretical aspects and the implementation of it and one of his papers was a widely cited point of reference for years), arithmetic circuits (a topic he still pursues nowadays) and fault tolerance (in this area he co-authored a book published by MIT Press). His international visibility is widely recognised, especially in the areas of image processing, and he has received a Pattern Recognition Society award for his research on computer arithmetic (he was for many years on the Programme Committee of the IEEE Conference on Computer Arithmetic, the most significant conference in this field). He has served on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Pattern Recognition and of the Journal of VLSI Signal Processing and has been chairman of the programme committee of several international conferences. He has received several national and international awards for his scientific work.
Alongside his didactic and scientific activities, however, he has dealt with organisational aspects of great importance; in particular, he was director of the Study Centre for Information Processing Systems Engineering (CSISEI), a body of the National Research Council based at Politecnico di Milano."
[extract from the 2009 nomination statement]