Professor at University of Parma
Optiklab Director
Curriculum Vitae
Alberto Bononi is a professor of Telecommunications at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione of the Università di Parma, where he served since May 1995.
He taught the following courses: “Teoria dei Segnali A” (Probability Theory) for the Laurea Course in Electrical and Telecommunication Engineering ; “Reti di Telecomunicazioni B” (Data Networks B) ; “Comunicazioni ottiche A” (Optical Communications A) for the Laurea Specialistica Course in Telecommunication Engineering.
He now teaches: Information Theory , Detection and Estimation and Machine Learning for Pattern Recognition for the Master course Communication Engineering (in English).
His research interests range from the study and performance evaluation of broadband optical networks, both packet- and circuit-switched, to the design of wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) long-haul terrestrial and submarine optical transmission systems, with emphasis on the study of optical amplifiers, both fiber-based (EDFA, Raman) and semiconductor-based, on the study of polarizaton mode dispersion (PMD), and on the optimization of dispersion maps for WDM nonlinear fiber propagation.
Prof. Bononi received his Laurea Degree in Ingegneria Elettronica (Honors) from the Università degli Studi di Pisa in April 1987. He received his Master of Art and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University , NJ, USA, in 1992 and in 1994, respectively.
In 1990 he worked for six months, with a fellowship from the Università di Parma, at the Hirst Research Center of GEC-Marconi in Wembley, UK, on a Marconi S.p.A. project on optical coherent FSK systems.
From 1994 to 1996 he worked as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught the undergraduate course ECE203 Circuit Analysis, and the graduate course ECE606 Optical Networks.
In the Summers 1997 and 1999 he was a visiting researcher in the group of Prof. L. A. Rusch of the Département de génie électrique of the Université Laval, Québec, Canada, for research in the field of doped fiber optical amplifiers.
From Sept. 1996 to Sept. 1998 he was the technical coordinator of the INCO-DC European project “DAWRON” (Design of Advanced Wavelength Routed Optical Networks) in collaboration with the group of Prof. P. Bayvel of University College London, UK, and the group of Prof. R. Gangopadhyay of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India.
From 2004 to 2007 he was the coordinator and principal investigator of the Parma Unit, within two bi-annual government-supported national projects (PRIN) named WONDER and OSATE, coordinated by Prof. Neri of Turin Polytechnic, for the development of metropolitan WDM packet-switched optical ring networks and all-optical packet switches. The Parma Unit took care of the gain transients in the network semiconductor optical amplifiers.
From 2007 to 2009 he was the principal investigator of project n. 13: “Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers for Optical Access Networks” funded by the Italian foreign-affair ministry within the Italy-Québec Executive Scientific and Technological Collaboration Programme.
From 1999 to 2012 he was the principal investigator of 12 yearly projects funded by Alcatel-Lucent Bell-Labs France (ALBLF) in Villarceaux, near Paris, on WDM design of long-haul terrestrial and submarine transmission systems. From Sep. 2009 to Sep. 2010 he spent a sabbatical year at ALBLF for research on 100 Gb/s very long-haul digital signal processing supported coherent systems.
Prof. Bononi has served as:
– Co-Chair of the session on “Local and metropolitan area networks”, SPIE EUROPTO International Symposium on Fiber Optic Networks and Video Communications, April 1993, Berliner Congress Center, Berlin, Germany.
– Technical Program Committee (TPC) Chair of the 11th Tyrrhenian International Workshop on Digital Communications, Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy, Sept. 1999.
– TPC Member of IEEE/OSA Optical Fiber Conference (OFC), Access Networks Subcommittee H, in 2002 and 2003.
– TPC member of the conference AEIT-LEOS Fotonica in the 5 years 2003-2007.
– TPC member of IEEE/OSA Asia-Pacific Optical Communications Conference (APOC), Optical Amplifiers Subcommittee, in the 3 years 2005-2007.
– TPC Member of OSA Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics (CLEO) – Subcommittee 12, in 2010.
– TPC member of the Optical Networks and Systems Symposium (ONS) of the Globecom conference in 2008-2009(co-chair)-2010.
– TPC member of European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC), Transmission Systems Subcommittee 4, in the 4 years 2009-2012.
He is author or co-author of over 75 international journal papers (3 invited) and over 110 conference papers (10 invited), two patents and 3 book chapters. He is editor and co-author of the book Optical Networking , Springer, London, 1999, and co-author of the textbooks “Teoria della Probabilità e Variabili Aleatorie con Applicazioni”, McGraw-Hill, Milano, 2005, and “Introduzione a: Teoria della probabilita’ e variabili aleatorie, con applicazioni all’ingegneria e alle scienze” , Esculapio, Bologna, 2008.
Since Feb 2013 he is a Senior Member of IEEE. In 2007-2010 he served as an Associate Editor and from 2010 to-date as the Area Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications for the “Optical Communications” area.