Smart computing is an important multi-disciplinary area where advanced computational methods and technologies are combined with engineering approaches to create systems, applications and new services that meet the needs of society. Several and diverse application areas are covered, including business, health-care, energy, transportation systems, environment, security, surveillance, industrial systems, information retrieval and publishing, entertainment and creativity, social activities. In all these areas, innovation requires both conceiving new applications and services, as well as improving the efficiency, reliability, and susteinability of the existing ones.
This PhD program provides a high-profile scientific training on building software intensive systems and applications that meet the needs of users and society through a principled exploitation of advanced methods of computer science and engineering. This combines together theoretical and practical aspects to advance our understanding of how to design and build smart computing systems and how to use computing technology to design smart things and make human life better. The development of smart computing systems intertwins, in a holistic way, most major areas of computer science and engineering, including reconfigurable computing, computer architectures, operating systems, computational intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, software engineering, quantitative and formal methods for performance and dependability evaluation, automatic media interpretation, computer vision, internet technologies, distributed computing and sensing, pervasive computing, social computing, computer security. Additionally, many interdisciplinary applications exist linking computing to more traditional scientific disciplines such as biology, chemistry, neurosciences, medicine, physics, and economy.
The program is co-financed by the Universities of Florence, Pisa, and Siena, and by Regione Toscana under the European Social Fund. Two National Research Council institutes: ISTI and IIT are supporting partners.