MAURIZIO DÈCINA

INTERVIEW

Good morning, Professor Dècina. Thank you for agreeing to meet.
You are now in an institution where information technologies are taught: the Politecnico di Milano. Information typically arises from electronics, as the mother material that allows the technical processing of information.
Storicamente l’elettronica di divide in tre branche: telecomunicazioni, controlli automatici, calcolatori. I controlli automatici hanno dato filiazione a due settori importanti: la bioingegneria e l’ingegneria gestionale.
Today the degree in management engineering is going through a moment of great success; it is a course of study that also provides notions of economics, technology and other knowledge functional to work in the company. Keep in mind that today in our country there is a great demand for information engineers, amounting to almost half a million units. In fact, those who graduate in engineering at the Politecnico di Milano generally receive many job offers, especially in these times, in which technology is developing in many sectors so quickly that it requires an increasing presence of experts. It is estimated that in a few decades the demand for engineers will be even greater than it is today.
Who was Professor Francesco Carassa for you and for the Politecnico di Milano?
Francesco Carassa was the “teacher” for all of us who dealt with telecommunications, as was Professor Emanuele Biondi for automatic controls and Professor Luigi Dadda for computers. Francesco Carassa was the great initiator of telecommunications studies in our country: he dreamed of using radio frequencies with very high capacity. You know that there is the hertz, which corresponds to one beat per second, the kilohertz, which corresponds to a thousand beats, the megahertz to a million, the gigahertz to a billion and the terahertz to a thousand billion. Today we have reached almost terahertz. Francesco Carassa, on the other hand, who was born in 1922, in his youth tended to use microwaves, or microwaves, that is gigahertz. To do this he had in turn a great teacher, the teacher of all those who, in our country, have dealt with and are involved in electronics, Professor Francesco Vecchiacchi.
Professor Vecchiacchi was an industrialist: in his day Italy was an important country from the point of view of industry, as opposed to today. Carassa worked with Vecchiacchi at Magneti Marelli. When Vecchiacchi died in 1955, Francesco Carassa became the research director of Magneti Marelli, a position he held until 1962.
The role of Magneti Marelli in the 1950s was fundamental. Television had entered Italy in the first half of the 1950s. In the second half of the 1950s there was a need to study how television works: there is a tower that emits a signal that is received by everyone; however this tower has a limited extension: it is not possible that a single tower can transmit the signal throughout Italy, as many towers must be erected as there are the most important Italian cities. And what did Francesco Carassa do? He used radio antennas, horn antennas with parabolic reflectors, to create a network of radio links as large as all of Italy. From 1955 to 1960 Marelli had made RadioLink microwave connections at 1 GHz for Rai, to allow the television channel to be broadcast throughout the country. We can therefore say that Carassa favored the significant cultural growth of Italy, given that television was also very important for the literacy of various areas of our country.
In 1962 Carassa decided to work at the University. Just in that year he won the chair at the Polytechnic of Milan and began to dream of working with higher frequencies. At the time, satellites used higher frequencies, such as 40 GHz, because they were mainly geostationary, so they were able to transmit well with this type of frequency. Carassa collaborated on the project of the Italian satellite, Sirio, in 1969. It took eight years to launch it into geostationary orbit, as it weighed 398 kg. Being geostationary, Sirius remained fixed on the zenith, that is, it rotated synchronously to the Earth. It was used to experiment with measurements, telephony, meteorology. Initially it covered Europe and America, then, in the last two years, its position was changed to cover Asia.
Towards the end of the 1970s, the Polytechnic was equipped with a satellite station, which was used to manage all the work concerning the Italian satellite Italsat, to which Carassa devoted a lot of time and commitment.
Carassa, a man born professionally in industry, brought all his knowledge into the University and founded the telecommunications sector. He was rector of the Polytechnic in the period between 1969 and 1972. He was President of the Board of the European Space Agency. He was one of the fathers of the Italsat satellite. It launched two Consortia within the Politecnico di Milano (the Consortium is an entity financed by the companies that live within the Politecnico): Cefriel, dedicated to the applications of Information & Communication Technology; and CoreCom, dedicated to optical communications. In this way he brought industrial technology into the Polytechnic. He was President of CSELT (Turin research institute in the field of telecommunications), President of Italtel and numerous other scientific institutions.
In 1983 Carassa won the most prestigious award in telecommunications, that of the Marconi International Fellowship, for contributions made in the field of satellite communications.
Professor Dècina, could you tell us what your path was?
I studied engineering in Rome in the 1960s, graduated in 1966 and started working in Rome. During this period I had as teacher Professor Peroni, one of Vecchiacchi's pupils and collaborators. In 1980, at the age of 37, I won the professorship at the University of Rome and then I went to the United States, at the Bell Laboratories, to study the operation of switching machines, or telephone machines. Later I worked in Italtel, where I held the position of Director of Industrial Research. In that position for four years I collaborated with a thousand other people to build a single software that would make machines run. In 1986 Carassa facilitated the transfer of my chair from Rome to Milan. In 1988 I founded Cefriel, together with Carassa.
In my life I have been involved with the internet. The Internet has had a very simple evolution. Initially there was the internet of the web, the one that is used every time searches are made with the browser; then there was a second phase of the internet, which began at the beginning of this century, which is that of the internet of social networks; finally there is a third generation of the web, which is the internet of things, the Internet of Things (IoT). This last phase consists of sensors that are placed everywhere to monitor or measure various situations, important for mechanization. The IoT is divided into two applications: the massive internet of things (Massive IoT) and the Mission Critical internet of things (Mission Critical IoT), in which human life is at stake. An example of the latter application are connected cars, which consist of a single car used by several people, since thanks to the autoguide it moves by itself between the various places according to the needs of customers. The car connected inside must have sensors that allow it to turn safely, without endangering the health of passengers or pedestrians.
The Internet Mission Critical joins human life, for example it has made the first surgical operation possible at a distance through a PAD that sends signals to the operating room. In this
situation the immediate connection is a really important safety aspect, in fact the reaction time is in the order of milliseconds, and the network allows rapid return signals.
The massive internet of things is everything related to the environment: it can be used, for example, to avoid landslides, earthquakes and floods and is applied in real time.
Low latency is also essential for the entertainment sector. With Million Entertainment, online gaming applications must allow little delay, to allow immediate play,
In 2015 I turned my interest to cellular systems. Bits are elementary units of information.
The first generation cell phones had a capacity of ten thousand bits per second. In 2010 we reached the fourth generation, with a capacity of 100 megabits per second. In 2020, it will reach several gigabits per second.
Bits are used not only by cellular radio technology, but also by wifi technology which, covering a smaller area, has greater capacity. Optical fibers have capacities of several terabytes per second.
In the massive internet of things there are entire technological cities: smart cities.
The 5G system marks a great revolution and is very innovative, the transmission increases and the Data Centers are located even a thousand km away. With Cloud Computing, the hardware is no longer everyone's own, the operating and application system is shared. The big companies are pushing in this direction: Amazon and Google. The purpose of this is to build memories, store and process information and finally transmit them through communication. The software in the cloud are placed even a thousand km away because the speed is very high. With virtualization there is a single operating system with containers equipped with software containing microsystems that are easy to manage, test and put into service. Development Operation is the large orchestration system that organizes by optimizing all applications. We have seen how Mission Critical applications in the 5G system are autonomous vehicles that allow telemedicine and robotics.
Viruses are a danger, in fact the cyber security requirements are very high. Hacking must be strictly controlled in order not to undermine the confidentiality or ownership of the so-called "data ownership".
How would you describe your teaching activity?
I define my teaching activity as anomalous with respect to the path of others. I have had experiences of various kinds and in various places around the world. I have worked as a researcher, in industry, as Full Professor in Rome, as Director of CEFRIEL (Research and Training Center) and since 1987 I have collaborated with Professor Carassa. I retired in 2012. I was commissioner of AGCOM and President of INFRATEL, a company that has the task of developing the optical fibers of areas in market failure. Optical fiber is essential for the internet of the future.
These are my awards: in 1997 I received the International Communication award, the same one that Francesco Carassa had received in 1992. Professor Carassa for the work done in the field of satellites and I for my work at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and Electronics. I also had the honor of being the President of the Communication Society.
Why, in your opinion, should we enroll in the engineering faculty?
Be engineers because there is a need in Italy: a million engineers are missing. Engineering studies must also be taken into consideration by girls: when I worked at ITALTEL my boss was a woman, Marisa Bellisario, ITALTEL CEO and I was a professor who had just returned from the United States who worked for her. Women are very good at engineering because they have two characteristic qualities of those who do this job: they are fussy and tedious.
The lack of engineers was already evident in my day: when I graduated in 1966, I received twelve job offers. Eventually, I chose to be a scholar because my father wanted me to be a professor.
In my life I have also been an entrepreneur: I went to the United States where I learned the basics of the Internet and once back in Italy I invested all my savings in a small company that dealt with the Internet. All the savings I had invested in 2002 multiplied by two hundred. I founded other companies and some have even gone bankrupt, but the important thing is to do things. Engineers do things.
Having industrial experience is very useful for the engineer. Collaborating with industry is essential: it contributes to career development and stabilizes correspondence with reality; it also develops skills that cannot be acquired in the University, such as the ability to organize, the ability to meet deadlines, the ability to distinguish important things from less important things. As Pasteur said, the discovery is made by prepared minds: the match between work in the company, which aims to create products, and basic research, which aims to search for algorithms, is essential.
I taught telecommunications and security for twenty years at the Politecnico di Milano, I taught how to protect networks. There are eight billion phones in the world today and they are destined to become more and more powerful. The cellular networks all talk to each other and this happens thanks to the mixed internet and telephone system. The evolution of 5G and 6G is destined for continuous evolution over time: from the 1990s to 2020, researchers have worked hard and well and will certainly work well also from 2020 to 2040.
How does a hacker get into an account?
There are many types of hackers: there are hackers who make security for example.
Hackers must penetrate a perimeter: for example, a company has a cyber, cyber security perimeter, where it stores its files and this perimeter must be protected. The hacker enters the network and begins to explore aspects of it, finds a vulnerability, enters the internal network and penetrates the corporate network. Once there, he grabs a terminal and listens, then steals the passwords of the network manager and takes over the network.
To defend oneself, it is necessary to ensure that there are no vulnerabilities within the network and to prevent the attack of the hacker: this is done with artificial intelligence.
Within the Internet there are various realities: 70% of the internet is private, it belongs to Google, Amazon, Facebook, each with their own networks made up of datacenters and optical fibers they own: this reality is called the Private Internet; then there is the public Internet (27%) and the dark web (3%). The dark web is often entered anonymously and the most horrendous things happen within it.
In these areas, things move with enormous speed: for example, Huawei has become a world leader in telecommunications in just 12 years.
The ability to guarantee privacy, secrecy and ownership of data is what is needed today to be hired: all companies need these three characteristics to protect their data.