Mario Baldi

Mario Baldi is an Associate Professor (on leave) of Information Processing Systems at the Department of Control and Computer Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, and concurrently a Fellow in the Office of the CTO, Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group, at AMD, San Jose, CA. His career blends deep academic research with extensive industry R&D leadership.

Education

• M.Sc. (Summa Cum Laude) in Electrical Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, 1993
• Ph.D. in Computer and System Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, 1998

Research Focus

Baldi’s research spans programmable data planes, software-defined networking, big-data analytics for network management, network security, high-performance switching architectures, optical networking, QoS mechanisms, and multimedia/voice-over-IP systems. He is especially known for pioneering work on P4-based programmable networks and SmartNIC architectures.

Publication & Patent Impact

Across 150+ refereed papers and 35+ US patents (plus European filings), his recent output concentrates on machine-learning-driven network data-plane functions, disaggregated stateful network services, and cloud-grade DPUs. The 2021–2024 articles emphasize real-time inference directly in the network data plane and modular SDN programming.

Awards & Honors

• Best Paper Award, IEEE ICC 2007
• Best Paper Award, IEEE ISCC 2008
• Best Paper Award, IEEE GreenComm 2009
• Best Paper Award, ACM/IEEE WI/IAT 2014

Grants & Projects

Baldi has served as Principal Investigator or Scientific Coordinator on numerous EU Framework and Italian national projects (PRIN, FAR), leading consortia on energy-efficient packet networks, trusted software execution, wireless mesh architectures, and streaming media delivery.

Teaching & Mentoring

He has taught graduate courses on Enterprise Network Technologies, Computer Network Technologies and Services, Networks/Cloud/Application Security at Politecnico di Torino since 2003. He has also supervised PhD collegi for the Computer and Systems Engineering doctoral program (cycles 19–23) and held visiting/adjunct positions across four continents.

Labs & Teams

Previously headed the NetGroup (Computer Networks Group) at Politecnico di Torino (2001–2007) and co-chairs the p4.org Architecture Workgroup, driving open standards for programmable networking.