Giulio Fontana received his M.Sc. cum laude degree in Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2002. Since then he has been working as research engineer at the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Lab of Politecnico di Milano (AIRLab), and since 2019 he also works at the Neuroengineering and Medical Robotics Lab (NearLab).
His activities concern the design, technical supervision and management of funded research projects in robotics, along with laboratory work and teaching. Over the years, he also accumulated experience in technology transfer, patenting and licensing. Additional interests and professional experiences of Giulio Fontana concern electroacoustics and sound perception.
Giulio Fontana participated (sometimes taking up formal roles such as Work Package Leader, Task Leader, Technical Leader) in many international and national projects, both completed and ongoing. Among the latter, many concern the study, design and implementation of scientific benchmarks for autonomous robot systems, such as SciRoc (H2020), EUROBENCH (H2020) and METRICS (H2020). SciRoc also manages the European Robotics League (ERL) benchmarking competition for autonomous robots, of which Giulio Fontana is one of the founders and organisers. Completed  projects in this line where Giulio Fontana had a significant role include RockEU2 (FP7), RoCKIn (FP7) -where ERL's key concept of benchmarking through competitions was born- and RAWSEEDS (FP6), which pioneering the idea of objective benchmarking of robot algorithms. In RobMoSys (H2020) he worked on developing a metamodel for the benchmarking process.
For what concerns other research lines, ongoing project AI-SPRINT (H2020) aims at developing an infrastructure for AI applications spanning the computing continuum from cloud to edge. Within AI-SPRINT Giulio Fontana works on the use cases, which include one focused on agricultural robotics. This is also one of the key tracks of the METRICS project mentioned above, and one of the main interests of Giulio Fontana.
Other examples of use cases, technology transfer and product development in Giulio Fontana's track record include: a Personal Mobility Kit adding assisted and autonomous driving capabilities to standard commercial wheelchairs (partly funded by European AAL project ALMA); a robotic bed mover for hospitals (pre-commercial procurement project funded by Regione Lombardia - which led to international patents of which Giulio Fontana is co-author); an energy-efficient washing machine (funded by the Italian Ministry for Economic Development); a machine vision system for intelligent automation of industrial wood-sanding machines (FP6 project MEPOS).
Giulio Fontana also participates in projects where the main driver is scientific exploration, such as Politecnico di Milano's interdepartmental project i.Drive (analysis of the interaction between driver, vehicle, infrastructure, and environment) or ROAMFREE (building a general-purpose framework for robust odometry, funded by Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research).
Giulio Fontana is co-author of 25+ peer-reviewed papers, international conference papers and book chapters. He also wrote or co-wrote tens of scientific and technical documents such as Project Deliverables and Technical Reports, and did design and writing work on a large number of project proposals, including those of all the projects he currently participates in.