Luca Mottola's Home Page

My research is about designing, building, and validating distributed software systems
to make the "Internet of Things" vision a reality.
Find more under research!

"The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague,
but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise"
E. W. Dijkstra - from the Humble Programmer, 1972.
(Read also another interesting article about abstraction).

Awards and Recognitions

Recipient of the 2011 ERCIM Cor Baayen Award as a promising young researcher
in computer science
Listed amongst Postscapes' IoT Top 100 Thinkers for year 2011, also based
on community voting
Recipient of Best Paper Award at the 10th ACM/IEEE Int. Conference on
Information Processing (IPSN), 2011
Recipient of the European EWSN/CONET Best Ph.D. Thesis Award granted by the Cooperating Objects Network of Excellence, 2009
Recipient of Best Paper Award at the 8th ACM/IEEE Int. Conference on
Information Processing (IPSN), 2009
Nominated as Best Paper Candidate at the 28th IEEE Int. Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, 2009.
Recipient of Best Demo Award at the 5th ACM Int. Conference on Sensing
Systems (SENSYS), 2007

What's new?

MakeSense paper accepted at ICSE NIER!
Our paper describing the makeSense framework "Towards Business Processes Orchestrating the Physical Enterprise with Wireless Sensor Networks" has been accepted at the New Results and Emerging Ideas track at the 34th Int. Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)!

IPSN Ph.D. Forum!
Along with Li Cui, I'll be organizing the IPSN12 Ph.D. Forum
on April 15th, 2012 in Beijing (China)!
Please consider submitting an extended abstract to participate!

New IPSN Papers!
Our papers "pTunes: Runtime Parameter Adaptation for Low-power MAC Protocols" and
"Strawman: Resolving Collisions in Bursty Low-Power Wireless Networks" have been accepted at the 11th ACM/IEEE Int. Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN)!

PLDI Tutorial!
I will be giving a tutorial titled "Programming Abstractions and Languages for Wireless Sensor Networks: Fundamental Concepts and State of the Art" at the 33rd SIGPLAN Int. Conf. on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) - next June in Beijing (China). This year, PLDI is also co-located with ECOOP, LCTES, and ISMM!

Scientific events I'm currently involved in:
ACM SENSYS 2012 (PC member):
10th International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems.
ACM/IEEE IPSN 2012 (PC member, Publicity chair):
11th ACM/IEEE Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks.
EWSN 2012 (PC member):
9th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks.
SESENA 2012 (Organizer, PC member):
3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering for Sensor Network Applications.
IEEE SENSEAPP 2012 (PC member):
7th IEEE International Workshop on Practical Issues in Building Sensor Network Applications.
CONET 2012 (PC member):
3rd International Workshop on Networks of Cooperating Objects.
IQ2S 2012 (PC member):
4th International Workshop on Information Quality and Quality of Service for Pervasive Computing.
DPMSS 2012 (PC member):
1st International Workshop on Data-intensive Process Management in Large-Scale Sensor Systems: From Sensor Networks to Sensor Clouds.

Previously, I was also involved in ACM SENSYS (PC member), ACM/IEEE IPSN (PC member), IEEE ICDCS (PC member), EWSN (PC member, poster/demo chair), IEEE DCOSS (PC member), IEEE SRDS (PC member), and SESENA (PC co-chair), among the others.

Selected publications

The following papers are representative of my current investigation and of projects I've been involved in (more under publications):

"Programming Wireless Sensor Networks: Fundamental Concepts and
State of the Art" with Gian Pietro Picco.
In ACM Computing Surveys. Volume 43, Issue 3. April 2011.
The paper is also the basis of our tutorial on WSN programming.
PDF
"Loupe: Verifying Publish-Subscribe Architectures with a Magnifying Lens" with Luciano Baresi and Carlo Ghezzi.
In IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Volume 37, Issue 2. April 2011.
The paper extends a previous publication appeared at 29th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Minneapolis (MN, USA), May 2007.
PDF
"Not All Wireless Sensor Networks Are Created Equal: A Comparative Study On Tunnels" with Gian Pietro Picco, Matteo Ceriotti, Stefan Guna, and Amy L. Murphy.
In ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks. Volume 7, Issue 2. August 2010.
PDF, Connectivity traces
"Programming Storage-centric Sensor Networks with Squirrel".
In Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN/IP), Stockholm (Sweden), April 2010.
PDF
"Monitoring Heritage Buildings with Wireless Sensor Networks:
The Torre Aquila Deployment" with Matteo Ceriotti, Gian Pietro Picco, Amy L. Murphy, Stefan Guna, Michele Corrà, Matteo Pozzi, Daniele Zonta, and Paolo Zanon.
In Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN/SPOTS), San Francisco (CA, USA), April 2009. Best Paper Award.
PDF, Award page, Publicity on WSNBlog I, Publicity on WSNBlog II
"Programming Wireless Sensor Networks with Logical Neighborhoods:
A Road Tunnel Use Case" with Gian Pietro Picco.
Public Demonstration in Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SENSYS), Sydney (Australia), November 2007. Best Demo Award.
PDF, Award page, Publicity on WSNBlog, Publicity on Contiki's Web Site, Pictures on LN Web Site
"Logical Neighborhoods: A Programming Abstraction for Wireless Sensor Networks" with Gian Pietro Picco.
In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing on Sensor Systems (DCOSS), San Francisco (CA, USA), June 2006.
PDF
"Programming Wireless Sensor Networks: From Physical to Logical Neighborhoods".
Ph.D. Thesis, advisor Prof. G. P. Picco, Politecnico di Milano (Italy).
EWSN/CONET 2009 Best Ph.D. Thesis Award.
PDF, Award page, Publicity on WSNBlog

Personal

"Dott. Paolo Mottola" Scholarship
The Italian Association for Liver Research is offering a scholarship
to carry out research on liver tumors.