CV: Navigation Product Line Manager

Work experience

Dates

2001 - present

Occupation or position held

Head of Navigation Products Line

Main activities and responsibilities

Leads the Navigation Products Line within the Competence Center of Thales Alenia Space Italia

In charge of design, development and production of GPS and Galileo receivers in the frame of major European (ESA/ASI/EC) programs, including ground, space and user applications:

o        Galileo Receiver Chain for the Ground MissionSegment (GRCN)

o        Galileo Test User Receiver (TUS)

o        Galileo-GPS/EGNOS Safety-of-life Receivers (GARDA, GIRASOLE, PEGASUS)

o        SW-Radio Receiver technologies (SWAN, GR-POSTER)

o        EGNOS RIMS-B receiver and EGNOS V2/V3 evolution studies

o        Spaceborne Real-Time Orbit Determination and POD Receivers (Lagrange, Proteus, ATV, COSMO, GOCE)

o        ROSA GNSS-based Radio Occultation receiver (OCS-2, SAC-D, MTmissions)

o        ENEIDE Soyuz-ISS mission

o        Railway GNSS-based Navigation Equipment (RUNE, GRAIL, GRAIL2)

Manages team resources, project activities and projects cost and schedule

Defines strategies and product roadmaps in line with the company Industrial and Business Unit objectives

Performs technical supervision on HW/SW architectures, navigation & signal processing, performance analysis, simulation tools, validation and testing

Interfaces customers and sub-contractors

Defines and supervises R&D activities in close cooperation with universities

Prepares technical proposals

Name of employer

Thales Alenia Space Italia S.p.A.

Type of business or sector

GNSS Navigation Systems, Aerospace Industry

Dates

1995 – 2000

Occupation or position held

GPS Systems & Software Senior Engineer

Main activities and responsibilities

Management and coordination of GPS receiver system engineering and software engineering activities

Specification, design and development of software for the Lagrange^TM space-borne L1/L2 GPS/GLONASS receiver used on-board the GOCE, Radarsat-2, SAC-C and COSMO-SkyMed missions

Software architecture design, integrity algorithms design, receiver simulation and performance analysis and validation of the RIMS-Rx B receiver in the frame of the EGNOS program

SW development and acceptance of the GPS receivers for the Proteus satellite platform (Jason1, Calypso, Corot missions) and ATV mission

In charge of an ESA study on GPS-based attitude determination algorithms

Development of the SW of the GPS Tensor^TM receiver, first space-qualified receiver for on-board real-time attitude and orbit determination, installed on the Globalstar satellite constellation and on several LEO missions

Implementation of navigation Kalman filter and attitude determination SW algorithms

Software development, testing and system analysis work for the ESA Automated Rendezvous Pre-development program (ARP). In 1996-97 supported the successful testing of the ARP receiver on three experimental flights of the NASA Space Shuttle (STS 80-84)

In 1996 was co-located in Palo Alto(California) for a period of 6 months working with the GPS development team of Space Systems Loral

Definition of real-time object-based SW architecture models and SW development processes, tools and practices used across the GNSS receiver product lines

Participation to company internal working groups on SW quality and SW process standards

Name of employer

Alcatel Alenia Space Italia S.p.A.

Type of business or sector

GPS Navigation Systems, Aerospace Industry

Dates

1991 – 1994

Occupation or position held

R&D Engineer

Main activities and responsibilities

In charge of the study, design and development of a demonstration prototype of an Autonomous Spacecraft Data Handling System in the frame of an ESA research program for on-board autonomy. Integrated HW and developed and tested ADA-based SW including:

o        Hard real-time distributed processing architecture

o        Autonomous mission planning SW and goal-oriented control techniques

o        Failure detection, isolation and autonomous system reconfiguration mechanisms

Name of employer

LABEN S.p.A.

Type of business or sector

Aerospace Industry

Dates

1987 – 1990

Occupation or position held

Software Engineer, Operating Systems

Firmware Engineer, Micro-Systems

Main activities and responsibilities

Design, development and test of an innovative Multibus-2 Transport Protocol SW package. The project resulted in winning the 1990 "Bull Technical Award"

Contribution to the design of the first UNIX-based multi-processor system (Honeywell-Bull DPX/2 workstations family) developing SW in the areas of:

o        Process scheduling and automatic load-balancing between CPUs

o        Kernel POSIX 1003.4 real-time standard

Study and design of the OSF/MACH Operating System kernel for a MIPS R3000 RISC multiprocessor system. During this period, frequently joined the Open Software Foundation Design Centre in Boston (USA)

Design, development and testing of firmware drivers for VME-based peripheral device controllers

Name of employer

Honeywell-Bull Information Systems S.p.A.

Type of business or sector

Information Technology Industry

Dates

1985 – 1986

Occupation or position held

Research Associate, High Energy Physics Dept.

Main activities and responsibilities

Design and development of the data acquisition system and processing software of the Forward Detector of the OPAL experiment

Contribution to the development and simulation of detector drift chambers

Post-graduate work with the Italian Nuclear Physics Institute (INFN) team at the EuropeanCenterfor Nuclear Research (CERN) involved in development and test of detectors and experimental data analysis

Name of employer

University College London and INFN

Type of business or sector

University, High Energy Physics

Education and training

Dates

1980 – 1985

Title of qualification awarded

Physics Laurea (Master) – 110/110 cum laude

Principal subjects/occupational skills covered

Physics, Maths, Nuclear & Particle Physics, Electronics, Computer Science

Thesis title: “Design and development of a data acquisition system for the OPAL High Energy Physics experiment at LEP (CERN)”

Name and type of organisation providing education and training

University of Bologna, Physics Dept.

Personal skills and competences

Mother tongue(s)

Italian

Other language(s)

English, French (basic)

Social skills and competences

Intercultural skills andcommunication skills gained by working in European and extra-European project teams, spent periods of work abroad (UK, USA), participates to working groups, conferences and teaches short university courses

Organisational skills and competences

Team Leadership skills gained in managing teams since more than 10 years: experience in team building and staffing, team members selection, tasks assignment, supervision, co-ordination and performance evaluation

Management of Product Line industrial revenues and economical parameters

Experience in managing, coordinating and working with multiple/complex project assignments and under pressure conditions

Experience in project management, cost and schedule, interaction with industrial project partners and international institutions

Experience in the defining product line strategies and roadmaps

Attended management courses:

o        IRI-Management course on Leadership (2003);

o        Course on Conflict management (2001);

o        Course on Communication skills (1999);

o         IRI-Management 3-month working group (1998)

Technical skills and competences

GPS & Galileo Systems

System Engineering and Project Management

GNSS receivers and equipment system engineering, analysis, design, development, manufacturing and related GNSS applications

GNSS systems integrity

Kalman filter, navigation and signal processing algorithms, SW modeling and simulation tools

Real-Time embedded software design and development

Software life-cycles and software safety-critical standards (ECSS, DO-178-B, GSWS)

Hierarchical Object-Oriented Design (HOOD), Structured Analysis & Design (Yourdon), UML

Preparation of industrial technical proposals, reports and technical papers

Attended technical courses:

o        UNIV.of PISA, course on Spread-Spectrum systems (2002)

o        UNIV.of LEEDS, Global Navigation Satellite Systems course (1995);

o        UNIV.of MILANO, Attitude & Orbit Control Systems course (1995);

o        CARNEGIE MELLON UNIV., MACH MicroKernel O.S. course (1990);

o        UNIV.of MILANO, Microprocessor architectures course (1985);

Involved in the "Galilean" Working Group (2003) assessing European capabilities on positioning technology and providing recommendations for development to the European Commission

Held short courses on GNSS Augmentation and Integrity at the “Master in Navigation & Related Applications” of Politecnico di Torino

Computer skills and competences

Programming languages: C, Ada, Fortran, Assembly, Matlab

Operating Systems: UNIX, Windows, Real-time O.S. (commercial and proprietary kernels), Sun-Solaris, IBM-AIX, VMS

Microprocessors: Motorola 680x0, MIPS R3000, SPARC, RISC6000, Analog Devices DSP210x0, SHARK, TexasDSP

Windows Office applications

Other skills and competences

Author/co-author of 40+ papers in the areas of GNSS, autonomy, and particle detectors

Speaker in several international conferences and workshops

"Best Paper Award" at the Institute Of Navigation ION-GNSS in 1999 and 2006

European Satellite Navigation Competition – Winner of LombardyRegion Galileo Prize in 2009

Thales Innovation Awards winner in 2006 and 2007

Bull Technical Award winner in 1990

Supervisor of several university graduation thesis at the Computer Science Dept., Aerospace Eng. Dept., Electronic Eng. Dept. and Physics Dept. of Univ. of Milan

Additional information

Member of the International Advisory Board of the Italian Institute of Navigation (IIN)

Affiliations: IEEE Computer Society (2000 – 2006), IEEE Communications Society (2003)

Several professional acquaintances in the Satellite Navigation community