Organizers

Marco Fanciulli (Imperia, 1961) is Full Professor of Condensed Matter Physics at the department of materials science of the University of Milano Bicocca and Associated Senior Researcher at the MDM-IMM-CNR Laboratory (Agrate Brianza, Italy) he established in 1998 and directed till 2015. He has contributed to the development of nanoelectronics devices: materials and processes for ultra-scaled nanoelectronics devices and for innovative non-volatile memories (high-k dielectrics, silicides, low-k), single atom electronics, silicon nanostructures (silicon nanowires, quantum dots); spintronics: magnetic tunnel junctions, donors in silicon for classical and quantum information processing, and neuroelectronics. For outstanding contributions in the growth and characterization of materials and nanostructures for emerging devices for information processing in 2015 he was nominated Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is (co-) author of 420 journal articles receiving 11517 citations, H-index: 49.

Valeria Bragaglia is a physicist specialized in condensed matter. She is Staff Research Scientist at IBM Research Europe – Zurich, currently researching in the field of Neuromorphic Devices and Systems. Her focus is on developing materials and tuning their physical properties to build new performing devices and circuit architectures for electrical cognitive computing. She leads the Resistive – Random Access Memory (ReRAM) effort but also works on Phase Change Memories (PCM) and Ferroelectric – RAM technologies. She obtained her Ph.D. in experimental physics in 2017 at the Humboldt University in Berlin, working at Paul-Drude Institute and Helmholtz-Centrum Berlin for Materials and Energy. She pursued research on Phase Change Materials for Memory Applications. She is (co-) author of over 50 contributions among which peer reviewed publications and patents. She is heavily contributing to the international scientific and industrial communities with invited talks and serving as symposia organizer at conferences/workshops. She is an IBM Research Outreach Ambassador and is involved in several mentoring programs aiming at promoting MINT and STEM careers to young students.

Susan Stepney is Professor of Computer Science at the University of York, UK.  Her research interests cover topics that treat life as a cyber-bio-physical system: that is, approaches that combine informational, biological, and physical aspects of complex systems. These include unconventional computing in novel material systems, from magnetic nanowires to bacteria, and the development of open-ended evolution in virtual systems.  In particular, she is working on novel ways to analyse the computational properties of in materio reservoir computers, and novel ways to scale up their power through composition.  She is co-Editor-in-Chief of the MIT Press journal Artificial Life, an Associate Editor of the Cambridge University Press journal Programmable Materials, and a Series Editor of Springer’s Natural Computing book series.

Wilfred G. van der Wiel (Gouda, 1975) is full professor of Nanoelectronics and director of the BRAINS Center for Brain-Inspired Nano Systems at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He holds a second professorship at the Institute of Physics of the Westfälische Wilhelms Universität Münster, Germany. His research focuses on unconventional electronics for efficient information processing. Van der Wiel is a pioneer in Material Learning at the nanoscale, realizing computational functionality and artificial intelligence in designless nanomaterial substrates through principles analogous to Machine Learning. He is author of 120 journal articles receiving 7500 citations.