People: Letizia Lo Presti

 letizia.lopresti@euroconcepts.it

Letizia Lo Presti was born in Palermo (Italy) in 1947.
She received the degree in Electrical Engineering with specialization in signal processing and communications from Politecnico di Torino in 1971. In 1972 she joined, as a researcher, the Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications (now Department of Electronics) of Politecnico di Torino, where, at present, she is Associate Professor of Signal Theory.

During her carrier, she has taught many courses at both the graduate and undergraduate level including: Signal Theory I (a basic course in Signal Analysis); Signal Theory II (an advanced course in Time-Frequency Distributions and Wavelet); Digital Signal Processing.

In the period July-December 1996 she was visiting researcher at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the California State University, Los Angeles.

Her research activites cover the field of digital signal processing (e.g., digital filters and wavelet transform for geophysical signals), array processing for adaptive antennas, data compression, and simulation of telecommunication systems.

She has over 25 years experience in the field of simulation of communication systems. Among her multitude of accomplishments, we may list:

 Principle investigator on numerous national and European funded research contracts;

 one of the creators of TOPSIM-IV simulation package. This time driven simulation package is among the very few solid simulation packages recognized internationally with proven performance over a decade of simulation and verification against build systems;

 author of two signal processing textbooks on deterministic and random signal processing;

 lead project coordinator for performance evaluation of lossless compression schemes in a satellite environment under Inmarsat contract (1994-1995 period);

 lead project coordinator for development of the RICE decompressor, under ESOC contract No. 12488/97/D/DK `Implementation of a CCSDS decompression library";

 author of over 100 journal papers and conference publications;

 director of the Signal Analysis and Simulation (SAS) group of the Politecnico di Torino;

 thesis advisor of numerous M.S. and Ph.D. students many of whom are under contract with the SAS group;

 among the main authors and CO-PI of the Helinet project, a research consortium of several universities whose aim is to conduct research on Stratospheric platforms for communications and surveilance missions.

In 2000 she co-founded EuroConcepts s.r.l. a R&D company specializing in the design of advanced communication links and software radio.