Cristina Silvano is a Full Professor of Computer Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria. She is the Chair of the Research Area on Computer Science and Engineering at DEIB and Vice-Chair of the PhD Program on Computer Science and Engineering. In 2017, she has been nominated IEEE Fellow “for contributions to energy-efficient computer architectures”. She annually teaches basic and advanced courses on computer architectures and operating systems. Her research focuses on Computer Architectures and Electronic Design Automation, with emphasis on power-aware design for embedded systems, design space exploration of energy-efficient computer architectures and application autotuning for manycore architectures and High-Performance Computing.

She received the Laurea Degree (M. Sc.) in Electrical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 1987 and the Ph. D. Degree in Computer Engineering from Univ. of Brescia in 1999. She started her career in industry as Design Engineer and then become Senior Design Engineer at the R&D Labs of Group Bull in Italy (1987-1996). She was part of the Bull-IBM Research team for the design of the first worldwide multiprocessor system based on PowerPC architecture (introduced in 1992 by Apple-IBM-Motorola). These multiprocessors were commercialized as Bull Escala UNIX Servers and as IBM RS/6000 Multiprocessor Servers. She spent several periods abroad as Visiting Engineer at Bull R&D Labs, Billerica (MA-USA), Visiting Engineer at VLSI Technology in Munich (D) and S. Jose (CA-USA) and Visiting Engineer at IBM Somerset Design Center, Austin (TX- USA). In 1996, she started her Ph.D studies by investigating power optimization and estimation techniques for embedded architectures. These power-aware techniques were applied to the Lx/ST200 VLIW processors, designed by HP Labs and STMicroelectronics and widely used in several embedded media processing products. From 2000 to 2002, she was Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Dept. of the Univ. of Milano. From 2002 to 2018, she was Associate Professor at DEIB, Politecnico di Milano.

Her research activities have been carried out in collaboration with several international universities, research centers and industries. Her research has been funded by several National and European projects selected by a competitive process. She has been Project Coordinator of three European projects: the H2020-FET-HPC project ANTAREX (2015-2018) on "Autotuning and adaptivity approach for energy efficient exascale HPC systems”; the FP7 2PARMA project (2010-2013) and FP7 MULTICUBE project (2008-2010). She had a continuous research collaboration with STMicroelectronics in Italy and France. She has been the Principal Investigator of two industrial research projects funded by STMicroelectronics (2003-2008). She has been Project Manager of the IBM/Politecnico di Milano Collaborative Innovation Center on Big Data Analytics (2015-2019). She is currently responsible for the DEIB research unit in the H2020 Exscalate4COV (E4C) European project on faster drug discovery to fight the Coronavirus and of the H2020 AI4DI European Project on Artificial Intelligence for Digitizing Industry. She has been Principal Investigator of two research projects funded by STMicroelectronics. 

She is an active member of the scientific community and she regularly serves in several international program committees. She also organized several international conferences/workshops as Program Chair or General Chair. She is Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Computers (TC) and the ACM Trans. on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO). She has served as Independent Expert Reviewer for the European Commission and for several science foundations. Her scientific production consists of more than 200 publications (with about 220 co-authors) including 38 top-ranked journal publications (including 21 IEEE/ACM Transactions and 1 ACM Computing Survey) and more than 100 scientific publications on peer-reviewed international conferences (collecting one Best Paper Award). She is co-editor of 4 special issues and 3 scientific books: “Near Threshold Computing”, Springer (2015), “Low-PowerNetworks-on-Chip”, Springer (2010) and “Multi-objective DSE of multiprocessor SoC architectures”, Springer (2011). She is co-author of the scientific book: “Power Estimation and Optimization Methodologies for VLIW-based Embedded Systems”, Kluwer Academic Publisher (2003). Based on Google Scholar, her current h-index is 34 and total number of citations is over 4000. She is inventor or co-inventor of 11 international patents (7 out of 11 already granted). She was advisor of 70+ M.Sc. students and advisor/co-advisor of 13 Ph.D./Post-doc students.