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 am an Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Italy and a Senior Researcher at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. My research is about designing, building, and validating networked embedded systems for Cyber-physical and "Internet of Things" scenarios! To that end, I try not just to talk and to write about these systems, but also to build and deploy them!

Awards and Recognitions

Recipient of the ERCIM Cor Baayen Award as a promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics, 2011.
Listed amongst Postscapes' Internet of Things Top 100 Thinkers , also based on community voting, 2011 and 2012.
Recipient of the Best Paper Award at the 10th ACM/IEEE Int. Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2011.
Recipient of the Best Paper Award at the 8th ACM/IEEE Int. Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2009.
Recipient of the European Best Ph.D. Thesis Award granted by the Cooperating Objects Network of Excellence, 2009.
Recipient of the Best Demo Award at the 5th ACM Int. Conference on Networked Sensing Systems (SENSYS), 2007.
Recipient of the Young Innovator Award given by MIT Technology Review Italia and Research Innovation Entrepreneurship Forum, 2013.
Nominated as Best Paper Runner-up at the 11th ACM/IEEE Int. Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2012.
Nominated as Best Paper Candidate at the 28th IEEE Int. Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), 2009.

What's New?

Young Innovator Award!
I've been selected to receive the Young Innovator Award given by
MIT Technology Review Italia and
Research Innovation Entrepreneurship Forum for 2013!

REALWSN 2013!
I'll be chairing the 5th edition of the Int. Workshop on Real-world Wireless
Sensor Networks (REALWSN), to be held at the Como Lake, Italy!
Check out the call for papers!

S-CUBE Keynote Speaker!
I'll be the keynote speaker at the 4th International Conference on Sensor Systems and Software, to be held in beautiful Lucca (Italy), on June 11st and 12nd, 2013!

New SECON paper!
Our paper "Electronically-switched Directional Antennas for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Full-stack Evaluation" has been accepted at the Int. Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON), to be held in New Orleans (LO, USA), in June 2013!

Scientific events I'm currently involved in:
ACM SENSYS 2013 (PC member, Poster chair):
11th ACM International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems.
IEEE ICDCS 2014 (PC member):
34th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.
IEEE RTSS 2013 (PC member):
34th IEEE Real-time Systems Symposium.
IEEE DCOSS 2013 (PC member):
9th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems.
ACM ESEC/FSE 2013 (PC member - Tools Track):
9th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.
IEEE LCN 2013 (PC member):
38th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks.
IEEE MASS 2013 (PC member):
10th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems.
ICE 2013 (PC member):
6th Interaction and Concurrency Experience Workshop.

Previously, I was also involved in ACM SENSYS (PC member - 2011, 2012, 2013), ACM/IEEE IPSN (PC member - 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013; poster/demo chair - 2013), IEEE ICDCS (PC member - 2011, 2014), IEEE RTSS (PC member - 2013), IEEE Percom (PC member - 2011, 2013), EWSN (PC member - 2010, 2012, 2013; poster/demo chair - 2011), IEEE DCOSS (PC member - 2010, 2011, 2013), IEEE SRDS (PC member - 2010), IEEE LCN (PC member - 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013), and SESENA (PC co-chair - 2011; PC member - 2010, 2012), among the others.

Recent Selected Publications

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

"Low-Power Wireless Bus" with Federico Ferrari, Marco Zimmerling, and Lothar Thiele.
In Proceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SENSYS), Toronto (Canada), November 2012.
PDF
"pTunes: Runtime Parameter Adaptation for Low-power MAC Protocols" with Marco Zimmerling, Federico Ferrari, Thiemo Voigt, and Lothar Thiele.
In Proceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN/IP), Beijing (China), April 2012. Best Paper Runner-up.
PDF
"Strawman: Resolving Collisions in Bursty Low-Power Wireless Networks" with Fredrik Osterlind, Thiemo Voigt, Nicolas Tsiftes, and Adam Dunkels.
In Proceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN/SPOTS), Beijing (China), April 2012.
PDF
"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
"Is There Light at the Ends of the Tunnel? Wireless Sensor Networks for Adaptive Lighting in Road Tunnels" with Matteo Ceriotti, Michele Corrà, Leandro D'Orazio, Roberto Doriguzzi, Daniele Facchin, Stefan Guna, Gian Paolo Jesi, Renato Lo Cigno, Amy L. Murphy, Massimo Pescalli, Gian Pietro Picco, Denis Pregnolato, and Carloalberto Torghele.
In Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN/SPOTS), Chicago (IL, USA), April 2011. Best Paper Award.
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

Personal

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