Ricardo Severino
Ricardo Severino has successfully defended his PhD Thesis at the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto, Portugal. The Thesis, entitled “Improving Quality-of-Service for Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks”, proposes a set of QoS improvement mechanisms for IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee networks, which are validated and demonstrated over two real-world cyber-physical application scenarios, also engineered during his PhD.
Ricardo scored 9 publications at top ranked venues, including one book chapter, 3 journal papers and 5 conference papers.
The jury was composed of José Alfredo Ribeiro da Silva Matos (FEUP, representing the Rector), Leandro Buss Becker (UFSC, Brazil), Vlado Handziski (TU Berlin, Germany), Manuel Alberto Pereira Ricardo (FEUP), Paulo José Lopes Machado Portugal (FEUP), and his supervisor Eduardo Tovar (CISTER/ISEP).
Sven Goossens
Sven Goossens earned his PhD degree after defending his dissertation on the topic "A Reconfigurable Mixed-Time-Criticality SDRAM Controller" under the supervision of Benny Akesson. The work proposes two major contributions: (1) a new memory controller architecture, which supports run-time reconfiguration of its TDM arbiter, designed to target mixed-time-criticality systems and (2) a parameterization of the concept of memory patterns where composable read and write patterns can be generated with negligible performance loss. A unique feature of this memory controller is its conservative open-page policy that leaves rows open in the memory banks as long as possible to exploit locality and boost average-case performance, but closes them just in time to avoid reducing the worst-case performance. At the end of January, Sven starts his new career with Intrinsic-ID in Eindhoven. Best of luck to him with his new job!
Claro Noda
Claro Noda successfully defended his PhD degree in October, under the MAP-Tele PhD programme, a joint venture of the Universities of Minho, Aveiro and Porto. This programme is an unified effort to prepare highly qualified human resources in Telecommunications.
The jury, composed by José Covas (U. Minho, representing the Rector), Rui Aguiar (U. Aveiro), Alexandre Santos(U. Minho), Jorge Sá Silva, (U. Coimbra), António Grilo (U. Lisboa) and also the co-supervisors Mário Alves (Politécnico do Porto) and Adriano Moreira, (U. Minho), granted Claro the highest possible classification of "Muito Bom".
Claro's work focused on improving reliability and timeliness in low-power wireless networks (LPWN) under radio interference. During his PhD, Claro actively contributed to the MASQOTS national project (on reliable mobility support in LPWN) and to the CONET European NoE (in the Resource Management and Adaptation research cluster). Claro's work has been published at top-tier conferences including ACM IPSN (Best Paper Nominee), IEEE SECON and EWSN.
