SCHIAVONI NICOLA LUIGI
In Memoriam
Emeritus Professor of Politecnico di Milano.
Nicola Schiavoni, Full Professor of Automatic Control, was born on October 31, 1951, and passed away on February 6, 2018 after a long illness. In this page, his friends and colleagues of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering wish to pay a tribute to him and remember him with affection and esteem.
Born in Manduria (TA), Nicola was a bright student in Electronic Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, where he graduated in 1973. Next, he held a research position at the Italian National Research Council and, in 1990, he became Full Professor in Automatic Control at the Politecnico di Milano, where he spent his entire academic career and was eventually appointed as Professor Emeritus. He also spent research periods as a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge (UK) and Berkeley University (USA).
Nicola fully interpreted the role of university professor, taking care with equal passion of the research, the teaching activities, and the important institutional roles covered over time.
Among his main research interests, we recall his significant contributions in the fields of decentralized control, multirate systems, predictive, networked, and fault tolerant control.
Nicola was an extremely scrupolous teacher, always clear and highly appreciated by students, also in view of the quality of the didactic material he prepared over the years. In particular, the textbook “Fondamenti di Controlli Automatici”, coauthored by him, has been for the last twenty years one of the most widely used references for the Italian scholar community in automatic control. In writing this book, he gave a fundamental contribution in terms of clarity and thoroughness. Furthermore, he also contributed to reformulate the study programmes in Automatic Control over the last twenty years.
Nicola also held important institutional roles: he was the Dean of the School of Information Engineering and coordinator of the study programme in Computer Science Engineering. He was always driven by a rare sense of attachment to the Politecnico, chairing the assemblies with balance and wisdom. For these reasons, Nicola was also highly appreciated by colleagues from other disciplines, who saw in him a guarantee of correctness and fairness. At a national level, Nicola gave a significant contribution as an active member of SIDRA, the Italian Society of Professors and Researchers in Automatic Control, of which he was a member of the first board of directors.
In addition to all that, Nicola was a special person, characterized by an elegant trait, a mild irony, and a great willingness to listen. Everyone naturally turned to him for advice and encouragement. At the same time, Nicola showed a great intellectual rigor, combined with a strict rationality.
Finally, we want to remember how he was able to deal with his terrible disease with great dignity, always ready for a smile, an advice, an exchange of jokes. We missed him and we will miss him a lot. We console ourselves by thinking that we had the privilege of knowing him and working with him for many years.
Nicola Schiavoni, Full Professor of Automatic Control, was born on October 31, 1951, and passed away on February 6, 2018 after a long illness. In this page, his friends and colleagues of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering wish to pay a tribute to him and remember him with affection and esteem.
Born in Manduria (TA), Nicola was a bright student in Electronic Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, where he graduated in 1973. Next, he held a research position at the Italian National Research Council and, in 1990, he became Full Professor in Automatic Control at the Politecnico di Milano, where he spent his entire academic career and was eventually appointed as Professor Emeritus. He also spent research periods as a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge (UK) and Berkeley University (USA).
Nicola fully interpreted the role of university professor, taking care with equal passion of the research, the teaching activities, and the important institutional roles covered over time.
Among his main research interests, we recall his significant contributions in the fields of decentralized control, multirate systems, predictive, networked, and fault tolerant control.
Nicola was an extremely scrupolous teacher, always clear and highly appreciated by students, also in view of the quality of the didactic material he prepared over the years. In particular, the textbook “Fondamenti di Controlli Automatici”, coauthored by him, has been for the last twenty years one of the most widely used references for the Italian scholar community in automatic control. In writing this book, he gave a fundamental contribution in terms of clarity and thoroughness. Furthermore, he also contributed to reformulate the study programmes in Automatic Control over the last twenty years.
Nicola also held important institutional roles: he was the Dean of the School of Information Engineering and coordinator of the study programme in Computer Science Engineering. He was always driven by a rare sense of attachment to the Politecnico, chairing the assemblies with balance and wisdom. For these reasons, Nicola was also highly appreciated by colleagues from other disciplines, who saw in him a guarantee of correctness and fairness. At a national level, Nicola gave a significant contribution as an active member of SIDRA, the Italian Society of Professors and Researchers in Automatic Control, of which he was a member of the first board of directors.
In addition to all that, Nicola was a special person, characterized by an elegant trait, a mild irony, and a great willingness to listen. Everyone naturally turned to him for advice and encouragement. At the same time, Nicola showed a great intellectual rigor, combined with a strict rationality.
Finally, we want to remember how he was able to deal with his terrible disease with great dignity, always ready for a smile, an advice, an exchange of jokes. We missed him and we will miss him a lot. We console ourselves by thinking that we had the privilege of knowing him and working with him for many years.