PD Dr. Michele Magno

Privatdozent/in at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering

ETH Zürich

Zentr. f. projektbasiertes Lernen

ETF F 109

Sternwartstrasse 7

8092 Zürich

Switzerland

Additional information

Research area

RESEARCH INTERESTS AND BRIEF SUMMARY

Michele Magno is currently a Senior Researcher and Pirvatdozenten at ETH Zürich, Switzerland at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET). He is head of the D-ITET Center for Project-based Learning at ETH (pbl.ee,ethz,ch). He received his master and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 2004 and 2010, respectively. He was postdoctoral research at Tyndall Institute, Ireland and University College Cork, Ireland, and a visiting professor at University of Nice and ENSSAT University of Rennes, France. His current research interests include smart sensing, low power machine learning, wireless sensor networks, wearable devices, energy harvesting, low power management techniques, and extension of the lifetime of batteries-operating devices. He has authored more than 350 papers in international journals and conferences. Some of his publications were awarded as best papers awards in IEEE conferences such as IEEE International Conference on E-health Networking, Application & Services 2018, IEEE Sensors Applications Symposium (SAS) 2018, IEEE International Workshop on Advances in Sensors and Interfaces 2017 among others. He is a senior IEEE member and an ACM member.

Peer-reviewed papers

· More than 350 peer-reviewed papers published, including 80 Journal papers.
Google H-index of 49 on February 2025. Full list of paper can be found here

https://scholar.google.ch/citations?user=ytj7UUcAAAAJ&hl=en

Academic Positions

· 2020-Currently: Senior Scientist, Senior Lecturer and Head of the D-ITET Center for Project-based Learning.

· Starting February 2025 – Fellowship Full Professor at IT:U, Linz, Austria, supporting intelligent sensing for industrial and space applications.

· 2017-2020: Senior Researcher and lecturer at ETH Zurich Switzerland, Dept. of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Integrated Systems Laboratory

· 2019-2024: Visiting Associate professor at Department of Electronics Design (EKS), Mid Sweden University, Sweden

· 2013-2017: post-doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich Switzerland, Dept. of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Integrated Systems Laboratory (Prof. Luca Benini)

· 2012-currently: technical support consultant at University of Bologna, Italy, Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering (DEI) – Microelectronic group (Prof. Luca Benini)

· Nov. 2014-April 2015: visiting researcher at Sophia Antipolis University of Nice, France, Laboratoire d’Electronique, Antennas et Télécommunications (LEAT). (Prof. Alain Pegatoquet)

· May 2012- October 2013: post-doctoral researcher at Tyndall and College Cork, Ireland, School of Engineering, Embedded systems group (Emanuel Popovici/Brendan O’Flynn).

· May 2011- August 2011: visiting academic guest at Tyndall Institute Cork, Ireland, Wireless Sensor Networks group (Brendan O’Flynn).

· May 2010-May 2012: post-doctoral researcher University of Bologna, Italy, Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering (DEI) – Microelectronic group (Prof. Luca Benini)

· · Industrial activities:

o Active collaboration with many companies during the European project and university partnership, among others STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments, Disney Research, IBM reserach.

o From 2012 to the present Consultant and Advisor for Verde LED, Cork, Ireland. To design and develop a smart light wireless control system (www.verdeled.com)

o 2016 to the present Consultant for Medicon Ingegneria, Bologna, Italy To design and develop wireless monitor system for logistic application (http://www.mediconingegneria.it/)

o Founder and advisor of SHelmet (http://www.shelmet.it/). A spin-off of University of Bologna. (Will be officially lunched early in2017)

Membership

Since	Membership
2017	Member ACM
2016	Senior Member IEEE
2013	Member IEEE

Additional information

AWARDS

Academic Awards

· July 2024: Best Paper Award at the EYES OF THE FUTURE: INTEGRATING COMPUTER VISION IN SMART EYEWEAR (ICVSE) Workshop of ECCV 2024 for the paper "Ultra-Efficient On-Device Object Detection on AI-Integrated Smart Glasses with TinyissimoYOLO" by Julian Moosmann, Pietro Bonazzi, Yawei Li, Sizhen Bian, Philipp Mayer, Luca Benini, and Michele Magno.

· June 2024: Best Poster Award at International Symposium on Power Electronics, Electrical Drives, Automation and Motion (SPEEDAM 2024) for the paper "An Ultra-Thin 4.3 mm Generator for Energy Harvesting on Operating Wind Turbine Blades" by Tommaso Polonelli, Guo Hug, and Michele Magno.

· May 2024: Best Paper Award at the 75th IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (I²MTC 2024) for the paper "Towards a Non-Invasive Monitoring System for Wind Turbine Blades" by Nicolas Schärer (ETH Zurich), Tommaso Polonelli (ETH Zurich), Julien Deparday (Ostschweizer Fachhochschule), and Michele Magno (ETH Zurich).

· April 2024: Best Demo Award at the 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI 2024) for the paper "TinyssimoRadar: In-Ear Hand Gesture Recognition with Ultra-Low Power mmWave Radar" by Andrea Ronco, Philipp Schilk, and Michele Magno.

· June 2023: Demo Award at IEEE IWASI for the project "Sensor Fusion and Low-Latency Embedded Control for f1tenth Autonomous Racing," led by Nicolas Baumann, Edoardo Ghignone, Andrea Ronco, and Michele Magno.

· June 2023: 1st Prize Winner at the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society F1TENTH Grand Prix held at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023) with the autonomous racing team founded in PBL, London (May 29 – June 2, 2023).

· May 2023: Best Poster Award Runner-Up & Best Poster Award at IEEE-ACM IoTDI 2023 for:

"A LoRa-based Energy-Efficient Sensing System for Urban Computing" by Lukas Schulthess, Tiago Salzmann, Christian Vogt, and Michele Magno
"Battery-free and Passive Wake-up Receiver for Underwater Communication" by Lukas Schulthess, Philipp Mayer, and Michele Magno
Additionally, Best Demo Award for "In-Ear-Voice—Towards Milli-Watt Audio Enhancement with Bone-Conduction Microphones for In-Ear Sensing Platforms" by Philipp Schilk, Niccolò Polvani (Logitech Europe, EPFL), Andrea Ronco (ETH Zürich), Milos Cernak (Logitech Europe), and Michele Magno.

· June 2022: Best Poster Award at the IEEE Sensors Applications Symposium for "Self-sustainable IoT Wireless Sensor Node for Predictive Maintenance on Electric Motors" by Tommaso Polonelli, Andrea Bentivogli, Guido Comai, and Michele Magno.

· April 2021: Best Presentation in Session Award at the 4th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) for "WindNode: A Long-Lasting and Long-Range Bluetooth Wireless Sensor Node for Pressure and Acoustic Monitoring on Wind Turbines" by Raphael Fischer, Hanna Mueller, Tommaso Polonelli, Luca Benini, and Michele Magno.

· November 2020: Best Presentation Video Award at the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting & Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems (ENSsys 2020) for "A Battery-Free Long-Range Wireless Smart Camera for Face Recognition" by Marco Giordano, Philipp Mayer, and Michele Magno, co-located with ACM SenSys.

· June 2019: Best Paper Award at the 8th IEEE International Workshop on Advances in Sensors and Interfaces for "A RISC-V Based Open Hardware Platform for Always-On Wearable Smart Sensing" by Manuel Eggimann, Michele Magno, Stefan Mach, and Luca Benini.

· March 2019: Best Presentation Award at the IEEE Sensors Applications Symposium 2019 for "SmartAid: A Low-Power Smart Hearing Aid for Stutterers" by Moritz Scherer, Kiran Menachery, and Michele Magno.

· September 2018: Excellent Paper Award at the 20th IEEE International Conference on E-health Networking, Application & Services (Healthcom 2018) for "Rat Cortical Layers Classification Extracting Evoked Local Field Potential Images" by Xiaying Wang, Michele Magno, Lukas Cavigelli (ETH Zurich), Mufti Mahmud (Nottingham Trent University), Claudia Cecchetto, Stefano Vassanelli (University of Padova), and Luca Benini (ETH Zurich).

· July 2018: Finalist (two designs in the top three) at the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design for:

"A Micro-Watt Smart Audio Detector for Zero-Power Always-On Sensing"
"ZeroTouch: Zero-Power Smart Receiver for Touch Communication and Sensing for IoT and Wearable Applications"

· April 2018: Best Poster Award at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2018) for "Zero-Power Receiver for Touch Communication and Touch Sensing" by Raphael Strebel and Michele Magno.

· April 2018: Best Poster Award at the 5th Workshop in Devices, Materials, and Structures for Energy Harvesting and Storage (Institute of Physics) for "Toward Zero-Power Smart Sensing Leveraging Micro-Energy Harvesting."

· March 2018: Best Paper Award at the IEEE Sensors Applications Symposium 2018 for "Combining Microbial Fuel Cell and Ultra-Low Power Event-Driven Audio Detector for Zero-Power Sensing in Underwater Monitoring" by Philipp Mayer, Michele Magno, and Luca Benini.

· September 2017: Best Paper Award at IEEE NGCAS 2017 for "Energy Efficient System for Tactile Data Decoding Using an Ultra-Low Power Parallel Platform" by Michele Magno et al.

· June 2017: Best Paper Award at the 7th IEEE International Workshop on Advances in Sensors and Interfaces for "DeepEmote: Towards Multi-Layer Neural Networks in a Low-Power Wearable Multi-Sensor Bracelet" by Michele Magno, Michael Pritz, Philipp Mayer, and Luca Benini.

· September 2016: Best Paper Award at SPIE Remote Sensing and Security+Defence (Edinburgh, UK) for "Computationally Efficient Target Classification in Multispectral Image Data with Deep Neural Networks" by L. Cavigelli, D. Bernath, M. Magno, and L. Benini.

· April 2016: Best Poster Award at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2016) for "KinetiSee: A Perpetual Wearable Camera Acquisition System with a Kinetic Harvester."

· November 2015: Best Paper Award at the eSame 2015 Conference (“Green your electronics: less power, more value”) for "An Autonomous Multi-Sensor Wearable Device with Human Body Energy Harvesting."

· March 2015: Best Poster Award at the IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (I2MTC 2015) for "Development of a Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network for Instrumentation and Analysis of Beehives" by F.E. Murphy, E. Popovici, P. Whelan, and M. Magno.

· November 2014: Award for a short visiting professorship with Labex Network in Sophia Antipolis, France.

· December 2011: Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing (ISSNIP 2011)

Teaching award, Industrial Awards, Patents,

· Kite Award 2024: Among the top three ETH initiatives for innovation in teaching. Empowering student Engagement, Skills and Success through Project-Based Learning

January 2024 - Sony Research Award - Investigates autonomous drone solutions featuring FPGA-based edge AI and event-driven camera technologies, targeting low-latency, real-time in-flight processing
February 2019: CISCO Innovation Challenge Semifinalist. Best 35projects on over 2000 worldwide project for “Smart Concrete: A self-sustaining smart sensor for the durability of concrete monitoring”. Running up for the final decision in April 2019.
March 2018: ETH Spark Award 2018 as the best five inventions of 2017 for “Zero-Power Receiver for Touch Communication and Touch Sensing.”
September 2017: EU Patent submission: “Zero-Power Receiver for Touch Communication and Touch Sensing.”
November 2015: Top 4 Team of Texas Instruments Innovation Contest 2015“Energy Neutral Multisensors Wearable Bracelet
November 2016: Award for First team for “Shelmet: a self-sustaining smart helmet for motor-bikers” at Texas Instruments Contest 2016, Automotive. Role: Advisor Professor.
November 2016: Award “Capitani dell’anno 2016, Automotive” Modena, 12-11-2016- Shelmet: a self-sustaining smart helmet for motor-bikers.

Course Catalogue

Spring Semester 2025

Number	Unit
173-0002-00L	Embedded Systems and Computer Programming
227-0085-04L	P&S: Microcontrollers for Sensors and the Internet of Things
227-0085-05L	P&S: FPGA in Quantum Computing with Superconducting Qubits
227-0085-06L	P&S: Neural Network on Low Power FPGA: A Practical Approach
227-0085-08L	P&S: Bluetooth Low Energy Programming for IoT Sensing System
227-0085-26L	P&S: Biosignal Acquisition and Processing for IoT Wearable Devices
227-0085-27L	P&S: Android Application Development (AAD)
227-0085-28L	P&S: iCEBreaker FPGA For IoT Sensing Systems
227-0085-39L	P&S: Python for Science & Machine Learning
227-0085-45L	P&S: Robotic Maze Solving with a TI-RSLK Robot (RMaze)
227-0085-46L	P&S: Embedded Systems With Drones
227-0085-47L	P&S: Machine Learning on Smart Phone
227-0085-48L	P&S: Introduction to Program Nao Robots for Robocup Competition
227-0085-49L	P&S: Smart Patch Projects
227-0085-63L	P&S: Enabling Smart and Low Power IoT Sensor Nodes
227-0155-00L	Machine Learning on Microcontrollers