Sunday Program

Piero Castoldi (IEEE SM’12) is Full Professor and Leader of the “Networks and Services” research area and Director of the TeCIP Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy. His most recent research interests lie in the areas of optical network architectures, interconnection networks for Data Centers, networks for industrial applications, 5G/6G networking and vertical applications. He is author of more than 500 technical papers published in international journals and international conference proceedings.

Emanuele Virgillito is an Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Torino, studying the physical-layer impairment for the orchestration and management of modern open and disaggregated optical networks. He obtained his MSc in telecommunication engineering and PhD degree on the observation and modeling of physical-layer phenomena in open optical networks both from Politecnico di Torino.

Stella Civelli is a researcher at CNR-IEIIT in Pisa, Italy. Her research interests are around optical fiber communications and secure networks. Stella Civelli obtained a Phd from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in photonics technologies (2019) and a master’s degree in applied mathematics from the University of Florence (2015).

Andrés Iván Martínez Rojas (b. 1997) earned his M.Sc. in Telecommunication Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, focusing on plasmonic photodetectors. Since 2022, he has been a researcher in the Photonic Devices Group, and in 2023, he began his PhD on photonic integrated circuits for 6G communications.

Pantea Nadimi Goki is currently an assistant professor at the TeCIP Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy. Her research focuses on high-capacity, secure fiber optic communication systems, including secure coherent transmission, and stealthy operations in dense WDM networks. She is the author of many journal papers and has participated in multiple research projects.

Geophysical monitoring plays a crucial role in understanding many processes occurring in our planet, while also being the fundamental cornerstone of several important disaster early warning systems. In the last years, the recent use of optical fibers for performing arrayed geophysical measurements has revolutionized how data is acquired and analyzed in this extremely sensitive field. This presentation will provide some insight into the principles and benefits of using fiber optic sensing for geophysical monitoring. It will provide an overview of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), distributed temperature sensing (DTS), and distributed strain sensing (DSS) technologies, which enable continuous, high-resolution measurements over long distances. These technologies offer several advantages compared to traditional methods, including real-time and naturally synchronized arrayed data acquisition, high sensitivity, and the ability to cover large areas with minimal infrastructure. Through case studies and practical examples, the presentation will showcase different possible applications of these technologies, from the  detection of seismic activity to the monitoring of water movements in the ocean. It will also address challenges such as signal processing, installation requirements, and the integration of fiber optic data with traditional geophysical methods. I will also discuss the future research directions in fiber optic sensing for geophysical monitoring. The talk will evidence the potential of these technologies to develop reliable early warning systems for natural disasters such as e.g. tsunamis.

At the Centre for Geophysical Forecasting (CGF) in Trondheim we have explored possibilities of using Distributed Acoustic Sensing as a complementary tool for various geophysical applications over the past 5 years. In the talk I will present some of these applications, and mostly focus on the possibilities and challenges. Examples of whale monitoring, oceanographic examples, geological mapping of the offshore subsurface will be discussed. The presentation will also include onshore examples on how DAS can be used to measure wind. At the end I plan to discuss future possibilities including how DAS-repeaters can hopefully be used for long range DAS-measurements.

The most faithful transfer of ultrastable optical atomic clock signals across continents is through bidirectional, noise-canceled single-mode fiber. I will present how such transfer can be achieved through multicore fiber in a way that is compatible with the unidirectionality of long-haul fiber optic systems, demonstrating a fractional frequency instability of 3´10-19 at 10,000 seconds. This opens the possibility of high-fidelity intercontinental optical clock comparisons, with applications in fundamental physics and the redefinition of the second, as well as tight synchronization in quantum networks.

Barbara Valotti received the Laurea (cum laude) degree in Philosophy from the University of Bologna, with a dissertation in the History of Science on young Marconi’s background. She has been the Marconi Museum Director since its foundation (1999) in which she was the coordinator of the team that designed the museum, also providing the historical contents. She is the author and curator of several books and papers on Guglielmo Marconi (among them, “Marconi. Il ragazzo del wireless”, Hoepli, 2015, and “Beyond the Myth of the Self-taught Inventor: The Learning Process and Formative Years of Young Guglielmo Marconi“, History of Technology volume 32, 2014, pp. 259-275.) and recently edited the Italian translation of Marc Raboy’s biography “Marconi. The Man Who Networked the World”. She has been the coordinator and curator of exhibitions in Italy and abroad on the history of radiocommunications. She has been invited as speaker to several meetings and conferences on Guglielmo Marconi and the history of telecommunications.

Stefano Selleri (S’92–M’96–SM’03) received the Laurea (cum laude) degree in electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree in computer science and telecommunications from the University of Florence, Florence, Italy, in 1992 and 1997, respectively. He was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, in 1992, the McGill University, Montreal, Canada, in 1994, and the Laboratoire d’Electronique, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France, in 1997. From February to July 1998, he was a Research Engineer with the Centre National d’Etudes Telecommunications (CNET) France Telecom, La Turbie, France. He is currently an Associate Professor of Electromagnetic Fields with the University of Florence, where he conducts research on numerical modeling of microwave, devices, and circuits with particular attention to numerical optimization. He authored about 140 papers on peer reviewed journals on the aforementioned topics, as well as 6 books and 6 books chapters. He is also active in the field of telecommunications and electromagnetism history, having published about 50 papers and book chapters.
He is member of the IEEE History Committee, member of the IEEE History Activity Committee, Region 8 and member of the IEEE History Activity Committee, Italy Section where he serves and secretary.
Dr. Selleri has been an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Antennas and Propagation, since September 2007 and on the Editorial board of the International Journal of RF and Microwave Computer-Aided Engineering from 2008 to 2018 and ACES Journal since 2020.

Marco Di Renzo is a CNRS Research Director (Professor) and the Head of the Intelligent Physical Communications group with the Laboratory of Signals and Systems at CentraleSupelec – Paris-Saclay University (Paris, France). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, IET, EURASIP, AAIA, and AIIA; an Ordinary Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the Academia Europaea; an Ambassador of the European Association on Antennas and Propagation; and a Highly Cited Researcher. He is a recipient of the 2022 Michel Monpetit Prize conferred by the French Academy of Sciences and the 2024 Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications conferred by the IEEE Communications Society. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Communications Letters in 2019-2023, and he is now serving as a Voting Member of the Fellow Evaluation Standing Committee and as the Director of Journals of the IEEE Communications Society. He is a Founding Member, Academic Vice Chair, and Rapporteur of the Industry Specification Group on Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.

Are you tired of having to wait for your simulations to finish? Stressed that you will miss a deadline because your experimental data still needs to be processed? In this talk I will give a short introduction on how to use mex functions in MATLAB to speed up your code. Mex functions are C/C++ functions which can be called as standard MATLAB functions. I will also go into mexcuda functions, which are mex functions which can leverage the GPU through cuda for speeding up your code.

Presenting real-time energy monitoring for optical networks and services to boost sustainability through precise observability and optimized power management.

Comertially available Polarization Controllers (PC) are not always the desired size. Plus, automatized ones are expensive and hard to customize. Therefore, we designed and 3D printed our own PC to control modes, connected it to some stepper motors and aurduino and wrote a python script to manage it.

In this demo, we present a Matlab/Octave-based interface developed to integrate satellite orbital dynamics — in ultra-dense low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellations — with optical system performance analysis. By tracking the evolution of communication links over time, whether in inter-satellite or satellite-to-ground/ground-to-satellite scenario, the tool provides estimates of key parameters for the design and operation of satellite optical communication systems, including coverage profile, line-of-sight/access intervals, Doppler shift, free-space path loss (FSPL), SNR, etc. Our simulator comprises animated visualizations that display the changes experienced by these variables along the satellites’ orbital path.

This presentation introduces GNPy as an open-source tool for simulating optical network performance, showcasing a use case where GNPy is used to generate datasets for machine learning model training. We will explore the benefits of leveraging GNPy to create realistic data for transmission quality prediction and network optimization.

Laboratory instruments can be expensive. Researchers often need to perform simple tasks, such as monitoring low-speed signals with an oscilloscope, synthesizing RF signals, or controlling systems with a PID controller. Acquiring dedicated, application-specific instruments, like high-speed multi-channel oscilloscopes or low-noise PID controllers, can be cost-prohibitive and impractical. Advanced FPGA solutions offer a more affordable and versatile alternative, capable of performing various hardware functions. This demonstration introduces Red Pitaya FPGA as a powerful, cost-effective, and efficient tool for researchers and students.

Lab automation is crucial for enabling large-scale space-division multiplexed transmission experiments. Let’s explore the experimental setups used in recent high-capacity trials and discuss how automation can simplify and enhance the measurement processes.

We demonstrate an in-house built dither-free bias controller that can bias multiple modulators at arbitrary bias points with reduced hardware. We use a single high-resolution optical power sensing system with 16-bit resolution at 8 different current levels, along with an electronic multiplexing scheme to control the bias of multiple modulators. This controller can be used for multiple modulators or dual parallel modulators and is more suited to microwave photonic applications.