Eduardo Tovar received the Licentiate, MSc and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Porto, Porto, Portugal, in 1990, 1995 and 1999, respectively. Currently he his Professor of Industrial Computer Engineering in the Computer Engineering Department at the Polytechnic Institute of Porto (ISEP-IPP), where he is also engaged in research on real-time distributed systems, wireless sensor networks, multiprocessor systems, cyber-physical systems and industrial communication systems.
He heads the CISTER Research Unit (UI 608), a top ranked ("Excellent") unit of the FCT Portuguese network of research units. Since 1991 he authored or co-authored more than 100 scientific and technical papers in the area of real-time computing systems, wireless sensor networks, distributed embedded systems and industrial computer engineering.
Eduardo Tovar has been consistently participating in top-rated scientific events as member of the Program Committee, as Program Chair or as General Chair. Examples are: IEEE RTSS (Real Time Systems Symposium); IEEE RTAS (Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium); IEEE SDRS (Symposium on Distributed Reliable Systems); IEEE ICDCS (International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems); ACM EMSOFT (Annual ACM Conference on Embedded Software); Euromicro ECRTS (Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems); IEEE ETFA (Emerging Technologies on Factory Automation) or IEEE WFCS (Workshop on Factory Communication Systems). Notably, he has been Program Chair for ECRTS 2005 and WDES 2006, and is currently Program Co-chair of OPODIS 2007.
Currently he is team leader within the 6th Framework IST Network of Excellence ARTIST2, on distributed embedded systems.
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More information: emt@isep.ipp.pt
Luís Miguel Pinho has a MSc (1997) and a PhD (2001) in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Porto. He is a Professor at the Department of Computer Engineering - School of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto. The current research activities have the goal to provide real-time embedded systems with techniques and mechanisms to support the flexible execution of distributed applications. He has been involved in several EU projects like ESPRIT Project CaberNET (EP 21035), IST Project R-Fieldbus (IST-1999-11316), IST Project CaberNet (IST-2000-25088), IST Project ARTIST2 (IST-2001-34820) and EESD Project REMPLI (NNE5-2001-00825). He was Conference Chair and Program Co-Chair of the 11th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies (Ada-Europe 2006).
In the general area of real-time computing systems, the use of software as the key component in embedded applications is increasing the demand for attributes such as reliability and availability, which are more prevalent on systems based on rather static approaches and offline analysis. At the same time, there is an eagerness for these systems to be more evolutionary in nature, other than the totally pre-designed ones, which are currently widespread. Nevertheless, the design practices followed in current real-time systems are quite inadequate to address issues such as flexibility and adaptability. The problem is exacerbated by the current trend to distributed applications in systems with heterogeneous devices.
His current research activities have the goal to provide real-time embedded systems with techniques and mechanisms to support the flexible execution of distributed applications. Considering this, the main interests are:
- creating paradigms and middleware able to support applications with quality of service requirements and their distributed execution on heterogeneous nodes
- providing programming languages with mechanisms for flexible scheduling of software components
- providing feedback capability to operating systems, in order to allow applications to fully know the behavior and resource utilization of the system
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More information: lmp@isep.ipp.pt
Björn Andersson received his MSc (1999) in Electrical Engineering and PhD (2003) in Computer Engineering from Chalmers University of Technology. He is a Research Associate at IPP-HURRAY! Research group at School of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto. He has served on the program committees for the following conferences RTSS´07, WISES´07-08, ETFA´07-08, RTCSA´07, OPODIS´07, WFC´08 and PDCCS´08. And he participates in two European Networks of Excellence: ARTISTDesign and CONET; the former is about embedded systems and the latter is about wireless sensor networks.
In many applications in critical infrastructure, it is required that a computer node notifies another computer node about an event (for example, an outbreak of fire). The transmission of a message must be performed over a wireless channel and with a bounded and known delay. Offering a priori real-time guarantees to such traffic is challenging because the exact time when a message is transmitted is unknown; it may happen that another computer node transmits at the same time and this could cause a collision. The approach taken by Björn and his colleagues is to implement a medium access control protocol that is prioritized and collision-free and hence it is possible to exploit results in the real-time scheduling theory to compute an upper bound on the delay of a message.
It is expected that in the near future it will be possible to fabricate tiny computer nodes with sensing and wireless communication capability. Due to its low cost, such computers will be deployed in large numbers and they will collaboratively process sensor readings. This brings up the question how to compute useful aggregated quantities, such as the minimum or maximum, of this large amount of sensor reading. Björn and his colleagues are exploring distributed algorithms that exploit the physical layer to efficiently calculate aggregated quantities of sensor data.
All major processor manufacturers are now offering multiprocessors implemented on a single chip, a.k.a multicores. Those chips were traditionally designed for high-end markets but they are now increasingly used in embedded real-time systems. For this reason, Björn and his colleagues are also exploring how such processors, can be used efficiently in real-time systems. In particular, it is explored how a set of real-time tasks can be scheduled such that their deadlines are satisfied.
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More information: bandersson@dei.isep.ipp.pt
Mário Alves has a Degree (1991), a MSc (1995) and a PhD (2003) in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Porto. Between 1991 and 1995 he was a research fellow at the University of Porto, having collaborated at the CIM Centre of Porto and at the Systems and Robotics Institute (ISR-Porto), namely in the context of several European projects such as CNMA and CCE-CNMA. In 1995 he joined the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, belonging to the Electrical Engineering Department. Since 1997, he is a researcher of the IPP HURRAY Research Group - CISTER Research Unit. He has participated in several national and international projects, served as reviewer and Programme Committee member at several world-reputed conferences and has publish tens of scientific paper at top-level conferences and journals in his expertise area.
Currently, his research interests are mostly devoted to the area of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), namely in the specification and development of architectures for supporting real-time and reliable communications in large-scale critical ubiquitous computing applications. The main goal is to devise two-tiered network architectures where a more powerful wireless network (Tier 2) serves as a backbone for a WSN (Tier 1), based on standard communication protocols and commercial-off-the-shell technologies.
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More information: mjf@isep.ipp.pt
Anis Koubaa has a MSc (2001) and a PhD (2004) in Computer Science at the University of Henri Poincaré Nancy I, France and at the National Polytechnic Institute of Lorraine (INPL), France, respectively. He is currently Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Dept of the Imam Saud University, Saudi Arabia. He is a Research Associate of the IPP-HURRAY! Research group at School of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto.
His current research work is concerned with Providing Real-Time Guarantees in Wireless Sensor Networks. The work focuses on defining architectures and protocols for wireless sensor networks for providing improved real-time guarantees. He is particularly interested in the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol as a federating communication protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks.
One of the major goals of the work is relying as far as possible on existing standard communication protocols rather than defining new alternatives. The main reason is to push forward solutions that match with the standardization efforts and commercial-off-the-shell (COTS) platforms. For that purpose, the research work has focused on the use of the recently standardized communication protocol, IEEE 802.15.4, basically proposed for Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs).
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More information: akoubaa@dei.isep.ipp.pt
Shashi Prabh received the B.Sc (Hons.) degree from Banaras Hindu University in 1993, M.S. degrees in Physics from I.I.T. Delhi and Boston College in 1995 and 1998, respectively, the M.S. degree in Computer Science from New York University in 2001 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Virginia in 2007. He joined the School of Engineering (ISEP) at the Polytechnic Institute of Porto (IPP) as Research Associate in the Real-Time Computing Systems Research Center (CISTER) in 2007.
His research interests are in Computer Networks and Real-Time Systems. His current research is focused on distributed packet scheduling algorithms, network architecture and protocols for real-time wireless sensor networks.
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More information: ksph@isep.ipp.pt