IEIIT Torino - History

The seat in Turin of the Istituto di Elettronica e di Ingegneria dell'Informazione e delle Telecomunicazioni (I.E.I.I.T.) of the Italian National Research Council (C.N.R.) was born from the Istituto di Ricerca sull'Ingegneria delle Telecomunicazioni e dell'Informazione (I.R.I.T.I.) that was founded on 16th April 1999 by joining three former research centers:

• CENS (research centre on digital signal processing) established jointly by CNR and Politecnico di Torino in 1970
• CESPA (research centre on propagation and antennas) established in 1970 by CNR and Politecnico di Torino as an evolution of the 2nd department of the research centre on electronic and telecommunications
• CSTV (research centre on television) established in 1949 by CNR and the Italian National Electrotechnical Institute Galileo Ferraris.

The research activities of the three centres in Turin focused in the area known as "Information and Communication Technology" (ICT).

CENS studies were oriented to the real-time processing of signals, in general, and to the automatic recognition and synthesis of speech in particular. Researches were also carried out in the areas of computer architectures, CAD systems for the design of electronic circuits, modelling, identification and control of complex systems.

CESPA was active in the applied electromagnetic area. Studies mainly focused on microwaves and millimeter waves and several topics were investigated, ranging from radiations problems to components and systems. Researches were also developed in the optical field and concerned the electromagnetic simulation of optical devices and the analysis of the optical characteristics of materials.

CSTV (research centre on television) was established in 1949 on the basis of an agreement among CNR, IENGF and RAI, and was renewed in 1971 by an agreement between CNR and IENGF. The research activity of CSTV was initially devoted to the study of transmission and receiving techniques of the analogical video signal and to standardisation activities in this field. With the advent of digital signal processing techniques the activity was directed to two specific fields: television signal coding and image processing. In the field of coding is worthy of mention the participation to the SIRIO project, the first european experiment of digital video-signal transmission. In the field of image processing the activity was mainly devoted to feature segmentation, measure, and recognition for applications in biomedical and industrial field.

At present, researches carried out by IEIIT are the natural evolution of the CENS, CESPA and CSTV scientific traditions in the computer and telecommunication engineering scenario. These high-level activities are also enabled by the experience and know-how acquired during more than thirty years of excellent scientific work and now owned by the IEIIT researchers.