With 2008 we are entering a new three-year period where CNIT will reach its first 15 years of activity, operating in the areas of telecommunications and applied electromagnetism. From 6 founding universities of January 1995, the participation to CNIT has grown to the number of 37 universities to date, and the number of affiliate professors and researchers has exceeded the thousand units. The CNIT is set up as a reality which encourages and sustains the collaboration in applied research among universities, industries and national research institutions, and operates both at a national and an international level, thus helping the Italian university system to better exploit the limited and scattered resources that are available to it. CNIT thus represents in a way a ‘utility infrastructure’, which, being built from those people who believe in it, operates with enthusiasm and effectiveness, helping to strengthen the universities’ capabilities on the projects to be developed, also thanks to the know-how and expertise of several tens of employees in its own Research Units.

In the next few years CNIT will aim towards a few goals in particular: developing a wide national research initiative called “TERIT” (TElecommunications Research in ITaly) that has been launched together with the National Research Council (CNR), helping in supporting the onset of the new national technological platform on Photonics “PHORIT” (PHOtonic Research in ITaly), strengthening its National Laboratories of Naples-Cagliari and Pisa, promoting activities and acknowledgement of the Research Center for Radar and Surveillance Systems (RASS Center), actively participating to the European Research 7th Framework Programme as well as to National Research Programmes, increasing further the international collaborations, fostering an even closer cooperation with the industrial world, and, finally, offering opportunities for young graduates to experience a training to research within a stimulating well-qualified environment and an internationally-linked context.

The motto of CNIT “Exploiting existing resources for engineering solutions” is – now more than ever – well alive and participated by all, and the multi-disciplinary environment without rigid classifications, as well as the growing national and international acknowledgment CNIT is obtaining, are constituting an important reward for all the people, at all levels, who spend their energies and passion in CNIT. Finally, I would like to express a heartily thank to all the people who are devoting and will devote their efforts to CNIT, and to express my personal commitment, in my role as President, to support with the utmost dedication a model of inter-university cooperation which has given so far very good results and given significant satisfaction to us all.

The President
Giancarlo Prati