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Francesco Potortì - ISTI
- Area della ricerca CNR – Via G. Moruzzi, 1 – I-56124 Pisa
Operatore +39 050 588215
Tel +39 050 621 3058
Fax +39 050 621 2040
Email: Potorti@isti.cnr.it
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Short scientific biography of Francesco Potortì

I received my electronic engineering degree from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1991. I am a senior researcher at the ISTI-CNR institute in Pisa, Italy, where I have worked since 1989 in the field of satellite communications, fade countermeasure and terrestrial wireless channel modelling as a member of the Wireless Networking group.

While organising the 2011-2013 EvAAL competitions, my scientific interest moved to IoT and indoor localisation. I have defined the EvAAL framework, which is the basis for the IPIN indoor localisation competitions. The IPIN competitions, most of which I have chaired from 2014 to 2023, are part of IPIN, the Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation international conference, of which I chaired the tenth edition in 2019 and of which I am a member of the Steering Board.

I am Founding Associate Editor in Chief of the IEEE Journal of Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation (J-ISPIN). I am Executive Editor for ICT Express and Section Editor on "Navigation and Positioning" for MDPI Sensors.

I have participated in the European COST action 285 as Italian representative and I have participated in several European funded research projects as member and task leader.

My research interests have included communications protocols, specifically satellite and terrestrial wireless; Internet technology, specifically TCP/IP on wireless channels; simulation of communications systems. Currently they include RSS-based indoor localisation, interoperability, performance evaluation and standardisation of indoor localisation systems. I was co-inventor of a patent and I co-authored more than eighty peer-reviewed scientific papers.

I have supervised the use of software licenses in some European projects. I encourage the use of free software licenses in the research community.

I was the real-time software implementer and one of the inventors of the FODA/IBEA system for satellite communications, which had been patented in Italy. I wrote, alone or with others, many small-sized free programs, most of which I have used in my research activity.

I taught computer science and operating systems courses at the Engineering and Computer science faculties of the University of Pisa.


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I ported the Emacs editor to the Motorola Delta 68k architecture, I wrote some Emacs packages, and the 68020 assembler code of gzip. I made various minor contributions to Emacs and various parts of the GNU project.

On behalf of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) I have volunteered to maintain etags for about twenty years since 1993. I also wrote other small free programs.

I contributed to the Italian translation of the history of the GNU project, and I contribute to discussions, revisions and (few) translations in the Italian free software translation group and the Italian translation team of the GNU project documents.

I was cofounder of Associazione Software Libero, the only Italian associate of Free Software Foundation Europe, for which I wrote a short introduction to free software (in Italian).


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