Claudio Altafini

Background

I received a Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 1996 and a PhD in Optimization and Systems Theory from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, in 2001. I then moved to SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies) in Trieste, Italy, where I stayed until 2013. Since 2014 I am a Professor in Automatic Control in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Linkoping University.

Research

My research interests are broadly in the area of modeling and control of nonlinear dynamical systems. Over the years I have been involved with very different applications, ranging from robotics to quantum mechanics, from biological systems to complex networks. In the last few years the focus of my research has been almost exclusively on the last two topics: Systems Biology and Modeling and Control of Complex Networks.

Selected Publications

Complex Networks:
• G. Shi, C. Altafini and J. Baras. Dynamics over Signed Networks. SIAM Review, 61(2):229-257, 2019
• C Altafini. Consensus problems on networks with antagonistic interactions. IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, 58 (4), 935-946, 2013.
• G Facchetti, G Iacono, C Altafini. Computing global structural balance in large-scale signed social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (52), 20953-20958, 2011.

Systems Biology:
• G De Palo, G Facchetti, M Mazzolini, A Menini, V Torre, C Altafini. Common dynamical features of sensory adaptation in photoreceptors and olfactory sensory neurons. Scientific reports 3:1251, 2013.
• G Facchetti, M Zampieri, C Altafini Predicting and characterizing selective multiple drug treatments for metabolic diseases and cancer. BMC systems biology 6 (1), 115, 2013.
• N. Soranzo, F. Ramezani, G. Iacono and C. Altafini. Decompositions of large-scale biological systems based on dynamical properties. Bioinformatics, 28(1):76-83, 2012.

Quantum Control:
• C. Altafini and F. Ticozzi. Modeling and Control of Quantum Systems: An Introduction, (tutorial paper) Special Issue on Quantum Control of the IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, 57(8):1898-1917, 2012.

See my publication page for a complete list (and preprints), or my Google scholar page.

Teaching

From 2020 I am teaching the TSRT09 Control Theory course. In 2014-19 I was teaching the TSRT62 Modeling and Simulation course.

Some PhD courses I am teaching (or I have taugh) are:

• Nonlinear Control, normally given every second year.
• Opinion Dynamics on Social Networks, 2020
• Networked Dynamical Systems, 2015
• Systems Biology: nonlinear mechanistic models 2015.

See Teaching page for details.

Master Thesis proposals

I have several topics for Master thesis for Engineering students. Contact me if interested. Here are a few proposals (some in control, some "out of control", so to say):

• Controllability of complex networks
• Opinion dynamics on Social Networks
• Investigating the structure and organization of a drug-target network
• Inference of T cell gene regulatory networks and master regulators of diseases using ODEs