Luca Mottola's Home Page

"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).

I'm a researcher in the Networked Embedded Systems Group (NES) at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS). My research concerns programming Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), networks of tiny computing devices with sensing capabilities. I'm also involved in real-world deployments where my work is used to build reliable and efficient WSNs. You can find more under research or reach me at luca sics se.

In 2009, I received the EWSN/CONET Best Ph.D. Thesis Award for my Ph.D. thesis on WSN programming. In the same year, along with co-authors, I received the Best Paper Award at ACM/IEEE IPSN/SPOTS for our work on the Torre Aquila deployment. In 2007, along with
G.P. Picco, I received the Best Demo Award at ACM SENSYS with a demonstration based on the Logical Neighborhoods programming abstraction.

What's new?

CPSWEEK tutorial!
G.P. Picco and I are going to present our tutorial on WSN programming at the upcoming CPSWEEK, which brings together five leading conferences - HSCC, ICCPS, IPSN, LCTES, and RTAS - on the research and development of cyber-physical systems.
More info here! To register for the tutorial, please visit the CPSWEEK site.

IPSN paper!
The paper "Programming Storage-centric Sensor Networks with Squirrel"
has been accepted for publication at the
9th Int. Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN/IP).

ACM Computing Surveys paper!
The paper "Programming Wireless Sensor Networks:
Fundamental Concepts and State of the Art",
co-authored with G.P. Picco, has been accepted for publication on ACM Computing Surveys!
The paper is the basis of our tutorial on WSN programming.

EWSN papers!
The papers "Selective Reprogramming of Mobile Sensor Networks through Social Community Detection" and "Making Sensornet MAC Protocols Robust Against Interference" have been accepted for publication at the 7th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks,
to be held in Coimbra (Portugal).

Marco Zimmerling receives Best M.Sc. Thesis Award!
Marco Zimmerling's thesis "Automatic Parameter Optimization of Sensor Network MAC Protocols", which I co-supervised along with Thiemo Voigt, has received the Best M.Sc. Thesis Award at the
1st Int. School on Cyber-Physical and Sensor Networks. Congratulations to Marco!

Scientific events I'm currently involved in:
ACM/IEEE IPSN 2010 (PC member):
9th Int. Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks.
DCOSS 2010 (PC member):
6th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems.
EWSN 2010 (PC member):
7th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks.
IEEE SRDS 2010 (PC member):
29th IEEE Int. Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems.
IEEE SUTC 2010 (PC member):
3rd Int. Conference on Sensor Networks, Ubiquitous, and Trustworthy Computing.
IEEE SenseApp 2010 (PC member):
5th IEEE International Workshop on Practical Issues in Building Sensor Network Applications.
SESENA 2010 (PC member):
1st Int. Workshop on Software Engineering for
Sensor Network Applications (co-located with ICSE 2010).
CONET 2010 (PC member, Local chair):
1st Int. Workshop on Networks of Cooperating Objects.
IEEE VTC Fall 2010 (PC member):
72nd IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference.
DSD 2010 (PC member):
13th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design,
Special Session on Wireless Sensor Networks.
AdHocNets 2010 (PC member):
2nd International Conference on Ad-hoc Networks.
RTN 2010 (PC member):
9th Int. Workshop on Real-Time Networks.

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.
(To appear) in ACM Computing Surveys.
The paper is also the basis of our tutorial on WSN programming.
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
"A Self-Repairing Tree Topology Enabling Content-Based Routing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks" with Gianpaolo Cugola and Gian Pietro Picco.
In IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Volume 7, Issue 8, August 2008.
PDF
"Logical Neighborhoods: A Programming Abstraction for Wireless Sensor Networks" with Gian Pietro Picco.
In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing on Sensor Systems (DCOSS), San Francisco (CA, USA), June 2006.
PDF
"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
"Programming Wireless Sensor Networks with the TeenyLIME Middleware" with Paolo Costa, Amy L. Murphy, and Gian Pietro Picco.
In Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference, Newport Beach (CA, USA), November 2007.
PDF
"On Accurate Automatic Verification of Publish-Subscribe Architectures" with Luciano Baresi and Carlo Ghezzi.
In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Minneapolis (MN, USA), May 2007.
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

Personal

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