MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA, September 14, 2016

The Marconi Society, dedicated to furthering scientific achievements in communications and the Internet, will honor Italian researcher Stefania Bartoletti, Ph.D., with the 2016 Paul Baran Young Scholar Award. The 27-year-old researcher at the University of Ferrara, who was recently recipient of a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Global Research Fellowship, will receive the award at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA on November 2, 2016.

Bartoletti’s research focuses on providing accurate location of people and things in environments where current technologies, such as GPS, are unavailable or insufficient. The research area of wireless localization and navigation has many applications with the move toward the Internet of Things, where over 50 billion devices will be connected to the network by 2020.

“As her advisor, I have seen Stefania rise from undergraduate student to a brilliant young researcher. Her research embraces communication, localization, and information theories together with statistical inference and optimization for solving real-world problems. On an anecdotal note, Stefania conducted her research a stone’s throw away from the villa where Marconi made his first experiments,” said Andrea Conti, Associate Professor at the University of Ferrara.

Bartoletti just joined, as a visiting researcher, the Wireless Information and Network Science Laboratory headed by Moe Win, Professor at MIT. Her ground–breaking work relies on an agile research methodology that she is now expanding at MIT. She works at the intersection of theory and experimentation for the development of robust systems.

“Stefania’s tremendous positive energy has been the key to her success and it will be an asset to the Young Scholar program and to the Marconi Society in general,” said Professor Win.

Bartoletti became interested in solving problems of wireless localization and navigation because of the breadth of use cases and the people that her work will touch. “Localization systems will be a crucial part of the Internet of Things since they provide context-awareness in a number of situations. This allows me to work with diverse technologies spanning many concepts of information, communication, and localization theories. As a researcher, I find this very stimulating,” said Bartoletti.

During her time at MIT and University of Ferrara, Bartoletti will expand her work by developing learning techniques for analyzing the behavior of people and things in different environments. This behavior analysis will find application in intelligent transportation, smart buildings, and business intelligence. Using communication signals that are already present in the environment, called signals of opportunity, her research will allow the reduction of implementation costs and increase the privacy preservation.

“I am excited and honored to be selected as a Marconi Society Young Scholar,” said Bartoletti. “This is a wonderful opportunity to meet and work with luminaries in my field. I look forward to the career perspectives that they can give me during my post-doctoral work.”

Young Scholar candidates are nominated by their academic advisors. Winners are selected by an international panel comprised of engineers from leading universities and companies, and receive a $4000 prize plus expenses to attend the annual awards event. Three other Young Scholars were also selected this year.

Bartoletti will receive her award at the same event where Brad Parkinson, regarded as the “father of GPS,” will be honored with the $100,000 Marconi Prize.

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About The Marconi Society

Established in 1974 by the daughter of Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel Laureate who invented radio, the Marconi Society promotes awareness of key technology and policy issues in telecommunications and the Internet, and recognizes significant individual achievements through the Marconi Prize and Young Scholar Awards. More information may be found at www.marconisociety.org. Subscribe. Follow: Twitter and Facebook