Prof. Giovanni L. Sicuranza, Professor Emeritus of Electronics, has recently passed away. 

The entire University, in particular the Departments of Engineering and Architecture (DIA) and Physics, remember him for his academic work carried out with great passion, active commitment and strong dedication, and for his research in signal and image processing, in which he was an internationally renowned pioneer. 

The professor was born on 7 September 1940. After completing his studies in Electronic Engineering at the University of Padua, he joined the University of Trieste in 1967 as an Assistant Professor of Applied Electronics. He remained at the University until his retirement in 2011 as Full Professor of Signal and Image Processing. Since then, he has maintained a relationship with the University of Trieste as a professor emeritus.

In 1980, he founded the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL), which he directed until 2005. Under his leadership, the IPL grew to become a leading research centre. Many former members of the IPL are now prominent lecturers and researchers at prestigious European universities or hold leadership positions in research laboratories and industrial R&D centres around the world.

Prof. Sicuranza's early contributions in the field of signal processing focused on the design of efficient architectures for non-linear filtering. His achievements based on logarithmic representation or distributed arithmetic made it possible to use polynomial filters in practical devices as early as the 1980s. Professor Sicuranza's subsequent research activities covered a wide variety of areas, including multidimensional digital filters, image and image-sequence processing and coding, adaptive algorithms for system identification, echo cancellation and active noise control. 

He has published over 200 articles in international journals and conference proceedings and eight chapters in anthologies. He is the author or editor of four books: Multidimensional Processing of Video Signals (co-edited with S. K. Mitra, Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1992), Polynomial Signal Processing (co-authored with V. J. Mathews, Wiley, 2000), Nonlinear Image Processing (co-edited with S. K. Mitra, Academic Press, 2001), Advances in Nonlinear Signal and Image Processing (co-edited with S. Marshall, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, 2006).

He has chaired or served on the technical committees of numerous international conferences; he has been a member of the editorial board of the EURASIP journal Signal Processing and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, the Springer journal Signal, Image and Video Processing, and associate editor of Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing, Kluwer Academic Publishers. He has served as project manager for ESPRIT and COST research initiatives funded by the European Union and has consulted for several companies. He has been a member of the IMDSP Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the EURASIP Administrative Committee, where he also served as Chair of the Awards Committee.

Professor Sicuranza received the EURASIP Meritorious Service Award in 2006 and the EURASIP Certificate of Merit in 2015.