2 June: Antonio Capone and Maurizio Decina Officers of Republic

Antonio Capone, Dean of the School of Industrial and Information Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and Full Professor of Telecommunications, and Maurizio Decina, Emeritus Professor at Politecnico, were today awarded the title of 'Ufficiale Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana'.

Established in 1951, the Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (Order of Merit of the Italian Republic) is the first among national Orders and is intended to ‘reward merits acquired towards the Nation in the fields of literature, the arts, economics and in the performance of public offices and activities carried out for social, philanthropic and humanitarian purposes, as well as for long and distinguished services in civil and military careers’.

The ceremony was held at the Prefecture of Milan in the presence of the Prefect Claudio Sgaraglia and the Mayor Giuseppe Sala.

Antonio Capone is Full Professor of Telecommunications at Politecnico di Milano, where he has held the position of Dean of the School of Industrial and Information Engineering since 2019. He is the Director of the Advanced Network Technologies Laboratory (ANTLab) at the Department of Electronics and Information of Politecnico di Milano. He has been scientific head of the Internet of Things Observatory since 2011 and also of the 5G & beyond Observatory of Politecnico di Milano since 2019. From 2017 to 2022, he was a member of the strategy group POLIMI2040 in charge of defining possible future development scenarios for the University in the context of European technical-scientific universities.
From April 2021 to July 2022, he was a technical advisor to the Minister for Technological Innovation and Digital Transition Vittorio Colao and was part of the working group that dealt with the definition of the programmes for the development of fixed and mobile broadband, contributing to the technical aspects of defining the measures as well as to the exchange of technical views with the European Commission. Since 2024, he has been a member of the Steering Committee of the European Commission for the definition of connectivity indicators. He is a member of the Board of Directors of CEFRIEL, CNIT and Fondazione RESTART.
His expertise lies in the area of telecommunications networks within which he has carried out intensive research at an international level, as proven by his numerous publications in journals and conference proceedings. 

Graduated in 1966 with a degree in Electronic Engineering from Sapienza Università di Roma, Maurizio Decina became a full professor at this university in 1980 and moved to the same position at Politecnico di Milano in 1986. Professor Decina has equally divided his 55-year career between academia and industry. In fact, he has worked in the field of telecommunications in various fields of application: from research to teaching, from international standards to the prototype and industrial development of numerical switches, from operation to the regulation of telecommunications networks
He was scientific advisor to Bell Laboratories in Chicago (USA), director of Research and Development at Italtel di Milano, and scientific director and founder, together with professor Francesco Carassa, of the CEFRIEL consortium at the Politecnico di Milano. Professor Dècina was commissioner of the AGCOM Communications Guarantee Authority, president of the Ugo Bordoni Foundation in Rome and president of Infratel Italia, as well as a member of the Board of Directors of Telecom Italia, Italtel and other ICT companies.
His research activities have focused on digital transmission over coaxial cables and fibre optics, the development of high-capacity circuit and packet switching equipment, and the development of network interoperability and security. Professor Dècina was one of the 'fathers' of fast packet switching networks, an innovation that marked a turning point in communications, paving the way for today's Internet.