Nonlinear effects in optical fibers enable several kind of all-optical signal processing, ranging from amplification to filtering. In particular, the research activity focuses on the following topics:

Optical fibers can act as sensors, because they are intrinsically sensitive to (among the others) temperature, strain and magnetic fields. Beside enabling the multiplexing of several tens of discrete sensors, optical fibers sensors have the unique ability of performing distributed monitoring, where the physical field under analysis can be measured over the entire length of the fiber (up to several kilometers) with spatial resolution ranging from few centimeters to few meters The research activity covers the following topics:

High-capacity optical fiber transmission systems are the backbone of modern telecommunication networks. The research activity focuses on both long-haul systems and local-area networks.

The Photonics and Electromagnetics Group is active in the following research areas:

Operations Research is the discipline of applying advanced analytical and quantitative methods to help making better decisions. Operations Research is characterized by its broad applicability and by it rigorous mathematical foundations. In the last years, the Operations Research group at DEI gained an internationally-recognized expertise on advanced techniques for solving difficult Operations Research problems. Research topics include:

The Internet has brought in the last two decades an explosion of online communities, in some cases spanning over a billion participants - communities that are qualitatively different from traditional ones both because of intrinsic properties and because of their massive scale. Their analysis, and the analysis of the analysis tools themselves, remains a fertile ground for research (and one with a lot of money in it!) at the crossroads of many disciplines.