Smail Tedjini

Short résumé

Smail TEDJINI, received the master in electrical engineering in 1979 from Grenoble University, the Doctorat 3^rd cycle in Microwave in 1982 from Grenoble Institute of Technology and Doctor d’Etat in Physics from Grenoble University in 1985. He was Assistant Professor at the Electronics Dpt. of Grenoble Institute of Technology (Grenoble-inp) from 1981 to 1986, and Senior Researcher for the CNRS (Research French National Center) from 1986 to 1993. He became University Full Professor in 1993 and since 1996 he is Professor at the esisar, Embedded Systems Dpt. of Grenoble-inp. His main teaching topics concern Applied Electromagnetism, RadioFrequency, Wireless Systems and Optoelectronics. Now he has nearly 40 year experience in academic education, Research and management of university affairs.

He served as coordinator and staff member in numerous academic programs both for education and research. He was coordinator for Ph.D. program, Master and Bachelor programs for the Universities at Grenoble, some of these programs were under collaboration with international universities from Europe, Canada, Brazil, Vietnam, Egypt, Maghreb …  He served as the Director of esisar, Dpt. of Grenoble-inp. He is involved in academic research supervision since 1982. His main topics in research are applied electromagnetism, modeling of devices and circuits at both RF and optoelectronic domains. Current research focus on wireless systems with special attention to RFID technology & its applications.

He is the founder in 1996 and past Director of the LCIS Lab. Now, he is project manager within ORSYS group that he leaded until 2014 and founded 25 years ago. He supervised nearly 50 PhD and he has more than 350 publications and . He served as Examiner/reviewer/opponent for tens of Ph.D. degrees for universities in many countries (France, Germany, Finland, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Vietnam, Australia, Singapore, India, Brazil, Egypt, Maghreb…).

He supervised tens of research contracts with public administrations and industries. He is Member of several TPC and serves as expert/reviewer for national and international scientific committees and conferences including journals such as Piers, IEEE (MTT, AP, Sensors, MGWL, JRFID, Access), IET, Piers, MDPI, URSI, He served as project expert for French and international research programs (ISO, ANR, OSEO, European Programs, FNQRT, CNPQ…).

He organized several conferences/workshops/Summer Schools and was TPC chair/co-chair in numerous conferences: IEEE, URSI, EuCAP, EuMW. He the TPC chair of IEEE-RFID 2019 and was the General Chair of IEEE RFID-TA 2012. Life Fellow Member IEEE and URSI Fellow, Past President and founder of the IEEE-CPMT French Chapter, Vice-President of IEEE Section France (2008-2014). He was elected as the Vice-Chair of URSI Commission D “Electronics & Photonics” in 2008. He served as the Chair of URSI Commission “D” for the triennium 2011-2014. In 2014-2017 he was President of URSI-France. 2017-2019 he was vice chair of IEEE MTT-TC 24, 2020-2021 he served as chair of IEEE MTT-TC-26. Since October 2022 he is nominated as Emeritus professor at University Grenoble Alpes.

More than 70 years after H. Stockman’s publication of his landmark paper on “communications by means of reflected waves” and L. Theremin’s demonstration of his wireless microphone, which is the ancestor of modern tags, RFID technologies continue to attract ever-increasing interest in thousands of applications and will concern billions of devices. RFID has long been confined to traceability and identification applications, but with the advent of the Internet of Things (IOT) and the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), RFID is more and more considered as the TECHNOLOGY that enables the real implementation of IOT and AI. To fulfill such requirements, scientists and engineers are dramatically pushing the limits of RFIDs technologies exploring many new applications and exploiting new functionalities in particular for sensing and transforming the identification RFID tag in an Augmented tag. To achieve these ambitious objectives, it is essential to extend the application field of RFID for real environments characterized by the presence of lossy materials, such as food products or biological environments or even metallic environments. In addition, the transformation of RFID tags into Sensors is necessary to meet the RAIN and IOT standards. 

In this keynote, after the principle of operation and the physics behind RFID, an overview of the state of the art for RFID will be summarized. Then we will focus on methods allowing tags to acquire new functionalities and expand their capabilities, as well as development of RFIDs for real environments. In addition to the discussions on the design and characterization of RFID systems components, several relevant examples of enabling IOT and AI, will be discussed.