Alberto Broggi

Alberto Broggi
Prof Alberto Broggi in San Diego, in 2010
Born	December 1, 1966 (1966-12) (age 50) Parma, Italy
Residence	Italy
Nationality	Italian
Fields	Robotics and Computer Vision
Institutions	University of Parma, VisLab

Alberto Broggi is General Manager at VisLab srl (spinoff of the University of Parma acquired by Silicon-Valley company Ambarella Inc. on June 2015) and a professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Parma in Italy, and has been pioneering the field of machine vision applied to driverless cars and unmanned vehicles in general.

Alberto Broggi was born in Parma, Italy, in 1966. He studied electronic engineering at the University of Parma (1985–1990) and was the first person to get the degree in Electronic Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Parma on Dec 20, 1990. Broggi got a position as Researcher at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, University of Parma in 1994; shortly after he got his PhD in Information Technology. In 1998 he was with the University of Pavia as an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence. From 2001 he has been Associate Professor and then Full Professor at the University of Parma, where he has been the founder and leader of the artificial vision research group, worldwide renown as VisLab. On April 3, 2015, he received a PhD Honoris Causa from INSA, Rouen, France, for his lifetime achievement in computer vision with applications to vehicles.

Broggi has been leading a number of worldwide publications as a founder or as an Editor. In particular he was the Founding Editor of a Regular Department on 'Intelligent Transportation Systems' of the IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine (IEEE Computer Society) which he led from 1999 to 2003; and the Founding Editor of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Newsletter of the IEEE ITS Council first, and ITS Society after, which he led as Editor-in-Chief from 1999 to 2003 again. In 2004 he started serving the IEEE Transactions on ITS as Editor-in-Chief and resigned from this position in 2008 since -in 2009- he was elected President-elect of the IEEE ITS Society. He served the IEEE ITS Society as President for the term 2010-2011, and in 2012 he held the position of Past-President. He has been invited speaker and plenary speaker in a number of different conferences worldwide.

Broggi's research activities started in the early ’90s, when very few laboratories worldwide were investigating the applicability of artificial vision on board of moving vehicles. At that time no hardware architecture was able to deliver sufficient processing power to run real-time image processing algorithms.