Guido Guardabassi

Guido Guardabassi was born in Piacenza on 12 February 1940. In 1975, he became Full Professor of Automatic Control at Politecnico di Milano. He is Fellow of IFAC (lnternational Federation of Automatic Control) and Life Fellow of IEEE.

Through his research activity he has made fundamental contributions in numerous areas of Automatic Control, including among the most significant:

• complex composite systems (robust regulation of finite automata by output feedback, decomposition and asymptotic analysis of Markov chains, problem analysis as a unitary context for many crucial issues of large systems theory)
• multivariable linear control (structural uncontrollability of the system that generates the sensitivity coefficients, decentralised and asymptotically robust regulation under conditions of uncertainty, optimal calibration of parametric regulators)
• optimised periodic control
• direct design of control systems based on input/output data: inverse controller methods or soft non-linear modelling (structured identification of the process under control by means of a class of models described by the controller parameters or identification of models tangent to the process under control at the point of nominal operation and strictly linearisable by means of feedback from the output) and virtual input methods (rephrased as a controller identification problem)

He has held numerous institutional and scientific positions:

• President of the Council of Delegates for the degree course in Electronic Engineering
• Co-ordinator of the Ph.D in Electronics, Information and Systems Engineering
• Elected member of the Unified Academic Senate
• Director of the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering
• President of the Study Programme Board for Automation Engineering from 2001 (year of activation of the new degree course) to 2008.
• Chairman of the Standing Committee for International Activities of the IEEE Control Systems Society
• In the context of IFAC, he participated in the activity of the Technical Committee on Systems Engineering (SECOM) as a member (1976), Vice-President (1978-1981) and President (1981-1984).
• In 1980, he co-founded and was the first President of the SECOM working group on Computer Aided Design and Analysis of Complex Systems
• He was a member, Vice-President and President of the Scientific Committee of numerous IFAC events and, in the two-year period preceding 1990, presided over the first jury of the Young Author Prize established within the framework of the 11th IFAC World Congress
• He was a member of the Governing Council of IFAC from 1984 to 1990 and Chairman of the Editorial Policy Committee from 1990 to 1993
• He is a corresponding member of the Istituto Lombardo Academy of Sciences and Letters

The numerous roles of institutional and scientific character fulfilled by Guido Guardabassi testify to the leading role he played both within Politecnico di Milano and internationally.

With his work he has made a fundamental contribution to the development and affirmation of automatics both in the scientific and didactic fields. Among other things, he substantially contributed to the launch of the new degree course in Automation Engineering at Politecnico di Milano (2001)

In addition to his undisputed success as scientist and teacher, however, his personal qualities should not be forgotten: moral rigour, intellectual honesty, sensitivity, attention to people, humility; all brought together by a broad and profound culture, both scientific and humanistic.

Extract from the 2011 nomination statement