Personal web site of:

Nicola Blefari Melazzi, Full Professor of Telecommunications

Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Rome – Tor Vergata

Via del Politecnico, 1
00133 – Roma (Italia)
Tel: +39 06 7259 7501
Pers ass: +39 06 7259 7258
E-mail: blefari at uniroma2.it
Web: https://blefari.eln.uniroma2.it

Short bio:

Nicola Blefari-Melazzi is a full Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Roma Tor Vergata, where he served as Chair of the PhD program in Telecommunications Engineering, Chair of the undergraduate and graduate programs in Telecommunications Engineering and Chair of the Department of Electronic Engineering. From January 2017 to January 2023 he has been the Director of CNIT (National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications), a non-profit Consortium made up of 42 Italian Universities. More than 1,300 people, belonging to the participating universities, collaborate with CNIT, while the number of own-employees is more than 100. Since January 2023 he is the president of CNIT.

His research projects have been funded by Italian Ministries, by the Italian National Research Council, by major companies (e.g., Ericsson, Telecom Italia), by the ESA and by the EU. He has participated in 33 EU projects, playing the role of project coordinator and PI for eight of them. He has been a member of the board of the 5G Infrastructure Association, the private side of the 5G Public Private Partnership, a joint initiative between the European ICT sector and the European Commission, which funded with a 1.4 Billion Euro budget the R&D on 5G. He is still a member of the 5G Infrastructure Association, now re-named 6G Infrastructure Association, that recently founded the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking together with the European Commission, which is funding with 900 MEUR the research and development for 6G and related technologies. He has been appointed by the Ministry of University and Research as Italian representative in the Member States’ Representatives Group of such Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking.

Since September 2022, he is the President of the RESTART Foundation, established primarily for the implementation, coordination and management of the research program “Telecommunications of the Future”, funded by the Italian Ministry of University with 116 M€.

He evaluated many research proposals and projects in EU programs and served as TPC member, TPC Chair, General Chair and Steering Committee Chair for IEEE Conferences and guest editor for IEEE Journals. He has been an area editor for Elsevier’s Computer Networks. He is author/co-author of about 260 papers. His research interests lie in the performance evaluation, design and control of telecommunications networks.

 

 

Regarding research topics, focusing only on coordinated European projects, the main ideas developed were (date of proposal in parentheses):

• SIMPLICITY (June 2003): simplification of access and use of terminals, services and networks, fostering adoption and standardization through brokerage mechanisms and personalization tools.
• SMS (September 2005): design of Simple Mobile Services, mobile services targeted to specific locations and user categories, also enabling individuals and small businesses to become providers. The goal was to replicate the success of the Internet and the Web, leveraging the contribution of millions of developers and providers (a precursor initiative to the app ecosystem).
• CONVERGENCE (October 2009): definition of a content-centric framework for the Internet, with publish/subscribe functionalities, open source middleware, a semantic dictionary, and integrated mechanisms for security, privacy and digital forgetting.
• BONVOYAGE (August 2014): development of a service platform to optimize door-to-door multimodal transport of passengers and goods, integrating travel information, planning and ticketing through the analysis of heterogeneous data, both real-time and non-real-time (traffic, weather, user profiles and feedback).
• SUPERFLUIDITY (November 2014): design of a “superfluid” network, able to instantiate, move and scale services instantly and transparently across core, edge and cloud. Based on reusable components, a converged cloud architecture, virtualization and hardware-independent abstractions, it enables 5G services independent of location, time, scale and platform, reducing costs and complexity while fostering new business models and use cases.
• Fed4IoT (January 2018): addresses interoperability and cost challenges in smart cities through the federation of IoT and cloud resources via new virtualization technologies, creating scalable and interoperable IoT infrastructures as-a-service, reducing CAPEX and OPEX and broadening participation of new players.
• LOCUS (March 2019): enhances 5G with accurate and ubiquitous localization as a native network service, transforming raw spatio-temporal data into behavioral patterns accessible through simple interfaces. The integration of localization and analytics as-a-service enables more efficient network management and new applications, leveraging virtualization and AI.
• I-NEST (September 2020): the Italian national hub for the digitalization of SMEs and Public Administrations, based on fixed and mobile network infrastructures and cloud-native, intelligent, secure, high-performance services. It provides training, consultancy, prototyping and support in three key areas: AI for advanced analytics and sustainable processes, HPC for large-scale infrastructures and machine learning support, and Cybersecurity with accessible solutions for organizations lacking dedicated resources.