Luigi Dadda

Luigi Dadda is an Italian computer engineer. He was born on April 29 1923 in Lodi. He was among the first researchers on computers in Italy. He has been a rector of the Politecnico di Milano technical university for 12 years, and he still performs research in the same university.

He studied electrical engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, and graduated in 1947 with a thesis on signal transmissions, by designing a microwave radio bridge between Turin and Trieste.

His research turns very soon towards models and analog computers, and in 1953 he receives a grant from the National Science Foundation in order to study at the California Institute of Technology in Los Angeles.

In the meantime, the Politecnico di Milano asks for funding under the Marshall Plan scheme, for a digital computer: the request (120.000USD of the time) is granted, and the rector of the time, prof. Cassinis, asks him to join the design team at the Computer Research Corporation in San Diego, since the machine, a CRC 102A model, will not be maintained by the vendor after delivery and it is therefore needed to have in-house expertise on it.

Dadda complied, severing the NSF grant with CalTech and transferring to California. He will travel back on an old Liberty mercantile ship along with the precious machine, placed in the middle of cotton balls in order to protect its valves from dangerous vibrations. Upon disembarcation in Genua, the machine is declared with customs as "electrical appliance", as the only computer machine in the taxonomy of goods used at the time was a "punchcard machine": close enough, but the punchcard reader was not supplied with the computer, so it didn't fit. An additional problem was that, at the time, Italy's taxation imposed the application of a small paper slip similar to a stamp (proving payment of duties) on each and every valve used in the machine. Since demolishing the machine to apply the slips was out of question, the customs were so kind to allow Dadda to pay the tax as a forfait, and gave him a pack of slips to apply on the machine "as soon as possible". Those slips are obviously still in a drawer in prof. Dadda's desk.

The machine reached, at last, the Politecnico in September 1954, where it was activated in the backroom of the 2SUD room, resulting to be the first working digital computer in Italy as well as in continental Europe. In the following years, the research activity of Dadda focuses around this machine, using it for scientific and industrial applications, and training researchers and students of the Politecnico in computer science. Dadda created and taught the first courses on the subject. He also studied how to enhance the ALUs of the machines, proposing solutions such as the Dadda multiplier, which significantly enhanced performance of those circuits.

He reached the status of full professor in 1960, and was assigned the Electrical Engineering chair since 1962. He then moved to studying Petri net as a paradigm for the design of complex control systems. In signal processing he proposed new systems for convolution. He has been the director of the Computing Center and then of the Computer Architectures Lab of the "Dipartimento di Elettronica ed Informazione" of the Politecnico di Milano university.

Among the founding member of the Italian Association for Computing in 1961 (and President between 1967 and 1970), he has been a co-founder and director of the Italian journal of computer science Rivista di Informatica. He has been the proposer of the European Information Network, realized by CEE under the project COST 11. Between 1980 and 1982 he chaired the committee for science and technology of the Italian President of the Council of Minister.

He is the President of the ALaRI institute at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano.