- Full Professor of Computer Architecture at DEIB, Politecnico di Milano;
- Chair of the Research Area on Computer Science and Engineering at DEIB, Politecnico di Milano;
- IEEE Fellow (class 2017) for contributions to energy-efficient computer architectures.
- Link to short CV
Short Bio
Cristina Silvano is Full Professor of Computer Architectures at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering (DEIB), Politecnico di Milano. In 2020, she has been elected Chair of the Research Area on Computer Science and Engineering (including about 90 faculty members) at DEIB, Politecnico di Milano. In 2022, she was among the promoters of the new M.Sc. degree in HPC Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. In 2019-2021 she was Vice-chair of the PhD Board in Information Technology at Politecnico di Milano for the CSE area. In 2022, she served as a member of the National Technical Committee on Semiconductor Technologies appointed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. Currently, she is Leader of the Flagship project on “Hardware accelerators for deep learning” of ICSC, the Italian National Research Center for HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing.
Her research activities are in the areas of computer architecture and electronic design automation, with emphasis on the topics of design space exploration of energy-efficient architectures, low-power design of manycore architectures, accelerators for deep neural networks, and application autotuning for high-performance computing. She has published more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and six books, collecting so far more than five thousand citations. She is inventor of some international patents owned by Group Bull and STMicroelectronics. In 2017, she has been elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow for her contributions to energy-efficient computer architectures.
Her career has been twofold. In 1987, she started her industrial career as VLSI Design Engineer at the R&D Labs of Group Bull (Italy) spending some periods abroad as Visiting Engineer at Group Bull and IBM Research in France, Germany and US. In particular, she was Senior Design Engineer in the Bull-IBM design team of first worldwide multiprocessor chip set based on the IBM PowerPC processor, commercialized in Bull Escala UNIX Servers and IBM RS/6000 Multiprocessor Servers. In 1996, to follow her scientific research interests and her attitude to teaching, she started her academic career as Ph.D. student at the University of Brescia (Italy), then continued as Assistant Professor at the University of Milano (2000-2002) and Associate Professor at the Politecnico di Milano (2002-2017).
She has been Scientific Coordinator of three European research projects (ANTAREX, 2PARMA and MULTICUBE). She was among the promoters of the European research projects LIGATE, AI4DI, EXSCALATE4COV, EUMaster4HPC and, more recently, of the ODE4EC-DIG project promoting the open-source EDA toolchain. She was also Principal Investigator of some industrial research projects funded by STMicroelectronics on design techniques for AI accelerators and energy-efficient embedded processors and Systems-on-Chip used in a variety of audio, video and imaging consumer products.
She is an active member of the scientific community on computer architectures and EDA serving regularly in several international program committees. She was also Topical Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Computers and Associate Editor of IEEE Computer Architecture Letters. She is currently Associate Editor of the ACM Trans. on Architecture and Code Optimization and Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal on Parallel and Distributed Computing . She serves regularly as Independent Expert Reviewer for the European Commission and for several National Science Foundations.