Biography
Current position
Diego Deplano is an Assistant Professor (RTD-A) at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, Sardegna, Italy.
Education
All degrees in Electronic Engineering were awarded summa cum laude by the University of Cagliari, Italy.
- 2021
- Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering
- 2017
- M.S. in Electronic Engineering
- 2015
- B.S. in Electronic Engineering
Awards and fellowships
Awards
- 2026
- Best Young Author Journal Paper Award, IEEE Control Systems Society Italy Chapter, for “Robust Online Learning over Networks”, published in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
- 2022
- Best Young Author Award finalist, IFAC Conference on Networked Systems (NecSys), Zurich, Switzerland, for “Dynamic Max-Consensus with Local Self-Tuning”.
- 2021
- SIDRA Award for the Best Ph.D. Thesis defended in Systems and Control Engineering at an Italian university, awarded by Società Italiana Docenti e Ricercatori in Automatica (SIDRA). Ph.D. thesis
- 2019
- Best Presentation Award, Automatica.it, Ancona, Italy, awarded by SIDRA for “Stability and Consensus Analysis for a Class of Nonlinear Discrete-Time Multi-Agent Systems”.
Fellowships and mobility grants
- 2018
- Erasmus+ Placdoc 2017/2018, awarded research mobility programme supporting a six-month visit to CNRS, Grenoble, France.
- 2017
- Globus Studio/Tesi 2015/2016, awarded research mobility programme supporting a four-month visit to Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
- 2017–2019
- Graduate fellowship from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Cagliari.
Research projects
- 2026–2029
- ROSAS – RObotica general purpose as-a-Service per l’Agroindustria Sarda (general-purpose robotics as a service for the Sardinian agro-industry), Sardinia Regional Programme ERDF 2021–2027. Role: Work Package Leader (configuration, control and performance testing of robotic demonstrators).
- 2026–2028
- ICARUS – Intelligent CAmera-based Robust Unmanned Systems Navigation, Sardinia Regional Programme ERDF 2021–2027. Role: participant in the University of Cagliari unit, research partner of Nurjana Technologies.
- 2025–2028
- EOPAC – Tecnologie dell’Industria 4.0 e ICT per l’efficientamento e ottimizzazione delle produzioni agro-alimentari tipiche mediante la valorizzazione delle condizioni climatiche locali, Italian Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy (MIMIT), PN RIC 2021–2027. Role: participant in the University of Cagliari unit.
- Concluded
- e.INS – Ecosystem of Innovation for Next Generation Sardinia, Spoke 7, Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NextGenerationEU). Role: scientific coordination of the activities on distributed optimal control of energy communities, from 2023.
- 2019–2022
- IAPC – Ingegnerizzazione e Automazione del Processo di produzione tradizionale del pane Carasau mediante l’utilizzo di tecnologie IoT, Fondo per la Crescita Sostenibile “AGRIFOOD”, PON I&C 2014–2020. Role: member of the research unit OR3.
Seminars and invited talks
- 2025
- “Stability of Nonlinear Monotone Systems with Applications to Multi-Agent Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks”, Peking University, Beijing, China. Hosted by Prof. Z. Li.
- 2023
- “Stability of Nonlinear Monotone Systems and Consensus in Multi-Agent Networks”, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Hosted by Dr. N. Bastianello and Prof. K.H. Johansson.
- 2019
- “Stability and Consensus Analysis for a Class of Nonlinear Discrete-Time Multi-Agent Systems”, University of Toronto, Canada. Hosted by Prof. L. Scardovi.
- 2018
- “Lyapunov-Free Analysis for Consensus of Nonlinear Discrete-Time Multi-Agent Systems”, GIPSA-lab, CNRS, Grenoble, France. Hosted by Prof. C. Canudas-de-Wit.
Doctoral co-supervision
- Since 2024
- Marco Ledda, Ph.D. student, University of Cagliari (defence expected in 2028). Neural-network modelling of the evolution of dynamical systems.
- Since 2023
- Wenjie Zhao, Ph.D. student, University of Cagliari (defence expected in 2027). Resiliency in open networks via distributed formation of k-regular graphs.
- 2021–2022
- Zohreh Alzahra Sanai Dashti, Ph.D., University of Cagliari. Thesis: “Coordination of Open Multi-Agent Systems”.
Academic service
Editorial activities
- 2025–2026
- Associate Editor, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), as a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board.
- 2026–2027
- Associate Editor, American Control Conference (ACC), as a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board.
- 2024–2026
- Associate Editor, IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE).
Organization of scientific events
- 2026
- Co-organizer of the open invited track “Open Multi-Agent Systems: Control, Optimization, and Learning”, 23rd IFAC World Congress, Busan, Korea.
- 2026
- Session chair of “Optimization IV”, 65th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Honolulu, USA.
- 2022
- Member of the organizing committee of Automatica.it 2022, the national congress of the Italian control community, Cagliari, Italy.
- 2020
- Member of the organizing committee of Automatica.it 2020 (online).
- 2019
- Co-organizer of the invited session “Modeling, Estimation, and Control of Large-Scale Network Systems”, 58th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Nice, France.
Committees, memberships and reviewing
Member of the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Networks and Communication Systems (since 2022). Member of IEEE (since 2017), of the IEEE Control Systems Society (since 2020) and of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (since 2024).
Reviewer of more than 50 journal manuscripts, including Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Control Systems Letters and IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, and of more than 40 conference manuscripts for CDC, ECC, ACC, CASE, IFAC World Congress, IFAC ADHS and IROS.
Research interests
His expertise is the development of distributed control, optimization and learning algorithms for large groups of autonomous systems that interact within a communication or sensing network, with limited information availability and constrained resources, also when agents join and leave the network over time. His research interests include:
- Open multi-agent systems: coordination, optimization and learning in networks whose agents change over time
- Distributed optimization and online learning over networks, robust to asynchrony, communication failures and inexact computations
- Consensus and dynamic tracking of time-varying signals and network parameters, such as size, diameter and eccentricities
- Monotone and nonexpansive systems, contraction theory and monotone operator theory, with applications to recurrent neural networks
- Distributed estimation and control of large-scale networked systems
- Applications to multi-robot task allocation and routing, energy communities and buildings, and the agri-food industry