Silvia Strada was born in Milano, Italy, in 1965. She received the M.Sc. degree summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering (Politecnico di Milano, Italy, 1990), and the Ph.D. degree in Automation and Information Technology (Politecnico di Milano, Italy, 1993). She was obtained the Quazza Award for the best M.Sc. Thesis in 1990.
She has obtained the Quazza Award for the best M.Sc. Thesis in 1990. During her Ph.D. she was offered a permanent job by McKinsey&Co, Milan Office, which she finally declined opting for the academic career.
She is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Automatic Control at Department of Electronics, Information Technology and Bioengineering at Politecnico di Milano, Italy and Senior Member of the Move Research team (http://move.dei.polimi.it/)
Her main current research interests include robust control methods, intelligent mechatronic systems in various application domains, data analytics, modelling and identification in particular in the insurance telematics and wearable technologies contexts. More in detail, some of her main research activities focus on: prototyping and validation of a new-concept wheel balancing machine equipped with innovative inertial sensors and, more recently, the assessment of feasibility of the same balancer but human powered for developing countries; insurance telematic data analysis, from on-board units and smartphones, for driving style recognition and monitoring of vehicles’ state and wearing; assessment of mobility patterns for the analysis of the feasibility of transition to BEV, based on real travel datasets; human wearables for the automatic recognition of dangerous events while walking, for the automatic triggering of an airbag for workers and for individuals’ gait analysis. The investigation of a control-oriented, feedback system within a distributed IoT scenario including a blockchain-inspired validation mechanism is one of her younger research fields. She also developed an automatic feedback controller for the regulation of the relative humidity in museum showcases, employing innovative electrolytic membranes as sensors.
She is author of about 30 peer-reviewed scientific publications in the field of Systems, Control and Data Analysis and of 7 patents in the mentioned fields. She is member of the IEEE and of the IEEE Control Systems Society and, since September 2019, of the TPC of the 1st IEEE International Conference on Human Machine Systems. She helps as a reviewer of journal and conference papers. She has been or is manager and technical leader of many research projects, mainly in cooperation with private industrial companies. She is involved as focal point and scientific leader in the design and organization of the ”Robotics & Smart Assistance Systems” use case of the future Competence Center MADE Industry 4.0 at Politecnico di Milano.