Roberto Tempo was born in Cuorgnè, Italy, in 1956. In 1980 he graduated in Electrical Engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Italy. After a few years spent as a researcher at Politecnico di Torino, in 1991 joined the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) at the research institute IEIIT, Torino, as Director of Research of Systems and Computer Engineering. He held visiting and research positions at Tsinghua University and Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, Kyoto University, The University of Tokyo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, German Aerospace Research Organization in Oberpfaffenhofen, University of Wisconsin at Madison and Columbia University in New York.
Following his early-career research in the area of robust control, Dr. Tempo’s research activities were mainly focused on the analysis and design of complex networked systems subject to uncertainty, and various related applications within information technology which included PageRank problems associated with computation in the Google search engine, distributed localization of wireless sensor networks and opinion dynamics in social networks. On these topics, he published more than 200 research papers in international journals, books and conferences, including his wide-cited 2016 paper on Belief Systems published in Science. He was also a co-author of the book “Randomized Algorithms for Analysis and Control of Uncertain Systems,” Springer-Verlag, London, published in two editions in 2005 and 2013.
Dr. Tempo was a Fellow of the IEEE for “Contributions to Robust Identification and Control of Uncertain Systems” and a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) for “Contributions to the Analysis and Control of Uncertain Systems, for Pioneering the Probabilistic Approach to Robustness.” He was a recipient of the “IEEE Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award”, of the “Automatica Outstanding Paper Prize Award”, and of the “Distinguished Member Award” from the IEEE Control Systems Society. He was a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences, Institute of Bologna, Italy, Class Engineering Sciences.
In 2010 Dr. Tempo was President of the IEEE Control Systems Society. During 2015 and 2016 he served as Editor-in-Chief of Automatica. From 2011-2014 he was a Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and in 2005-2009 Editor for Technical Notes and Correspondence of the same journal. He was a member of the Advisory Board of Systems & Control: Foundations & Applications, Birkhauser. He was Program Chair of the first joint IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference, Seville, Spain, 2005 and General Co-Chair for the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florence, Italy, 2013.
In 1991 Roberto married Maria Cristina and their daughter Giulia was born in 1996.
He was a passionate skier, hiker and climber. He was national instructor of ski mountaineering of the Italian Alpine Club.
On January 14, 2017, Roberto Tempo passed away during a skiing excursion in the Alps in Northwestern Italy.
