Giorgio Picci

Giorgio Picci (26 May 1942 – 11 March 2026) was an Italian electrical engineer and control theorist. He made widely recognized contributions to the field of Systems and Control, and in particular, to the areas of Stochastic Realization and System Identification. He had also been a pioneer in Computer Vision. He published a monograph (in English) and nearly 200 papers in these areas.

He was a Professor Emeritus with the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Italy. He was also the Italian director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Padua, where he actively promoted cultural and scientific exchanges between China and Italy, in collaborations with Guangzhou University in China.

Biography

Picci obtained the Doctor in Engineering (Dr. Eng.) degree (summa cum laude) from the University of Padua in 1967. From 1980 to 2012, he was the Chair Professor in System Identification at the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua. During his career, he had a number of visiting positions with different universities on three continents, namely North America (the United States), Europe (the Netherlands, Austria, and Sweden), and Asia (Japan and China).

Picci was a Fellow of the IEEE, a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control, and a member of the Galilean Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts in Padua.

Picci died on the morning of 11 March 2026, at the age of 83.

Selected publications

Monograph:

Lindquist, A., & Picci, G. (2015). Series in Contemporary Mathematics: vol. 1, Linear Stochastic Systems: A Geometric Approach to Modeling, Estimation and Identification. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg.

Textbooks:

Picci, G. (2024). An Introduction to Statistical Data Science: Theory and Models. Springer, Cham.

Picci, G. (2007). Filtraggio Statistico (Wiener, Levinson, Kalman) e Applicazioni (in Italian). Progetto Libreria, Padua.

Edited books:

Picci, G. & Valcher, M. E. eds. (2007). A Tribute to Antonio Lepschy. Libreria Progetto, Padua.

Beghi, A., Finesso, L., & Picci, G. eds. (1998). Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems: Proceedings of the MTNS-98 Symposium Held in Padova, Italy, July, 1998, Il Poligrafo, Padua.

Bittanti, S. & Picci, G. eds. (1996). NATO ASI Subseries F: vol. 153, Identification, Adaptation, Learning: The Science of Learning Models from Data. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg.

Recent papers: