Steering Committee

Antonio Escobar is CEO and co-founder of RedNodeLabs, a startup developing novel, dependable, real-time wireless IoT networks. He also works as a Project Manager for European funded projects at Infineon Technologies, driving strategic innovation initiatives at the European level. Antonio earned his PhD in 2020 from RWTH Aachen University, focusing on the analysis of synchronous transmissions. He holds an M.Sc. in Electronics and an M.Eng. in Telecommunications from the University of Granada.

Dr. Michael Baddeley is a researcher, and engineer with 15 years applied research experience within industry and academia. His interests are generally in the sphere of Internet of Things (IoT), where he explores novel communication and localization approaches for industrial applications. He’s author and co-author of over 40 IEEE/ACM publications, and named inventor on 6 US patents. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Bristol and an MEng in Computer and Electronic Systems from the University of Strathclyde. In between, he spent some time with research labs at Thales Research and Technology and Toshiba’s Bristol Research and Innovation Laboratory. He’s currently a Senior Director at the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi, where he works on multi-radio systems, device localization, and other embedded engineering challenges.

Gian Pietro Picco is a professor in the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) at the University of Trento, Italy, for which he has also served as Department Chair. His research has spanned software engineering, middleware, and distributed systems, and is currently focused on low-power wireless networking and localization for the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems. The research performed in his group emphasizes the validation of novel approaches and protocols via system prototypes and their evaluation in real-world testbeds and applications. He is the recipient of several awards, including a “Most Influential Paper” at ICSE’07 for a paper published a decade earlier, and Best Paper Awards at IPSN (2009, 2011, 2015, 2023), PerCom (2012), EWSN (2018), and IPIN (2019). He has
served as General Chair and Program Chair for several flagship conferences (e.g., SenSys, CPS-IoT Week, SECON, EWSN, IoTDI, DCOSS, Middleware). He is an associate editor for ACM Trans. on Sensor Networks (TOSN) and has served in the same role for IEEE Trans. on
Software Engineering (TSE) and the J. of Pervasive and Mobile Computing. He was also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Trans. on the Internet of Things (TIOT).

Marco Zimmerling is a Full Professor at TU Darmstadt, where he has led the Networked Embedded Systems Lab since April 2023. His research is at the intersection of embedded systems and wireless networks, with the goal of building real systems that are provably dependable, highly adaptive, and sustainable by design. Previously, he was a Full Professor at the University of Freiburg (2022–2023) and an Independent Research Group Leader at TU Dresden (2015–2022). He earned his PhD in computer engineering from ETH Zurich in 2015 (Lothar Thiele’s group) and holds a diploma degree in computer science from TU Dresden. His work has been recognized with the 2022 ACM SIGBED Early Career Research Award, the 2022 SenSys Test-of-Time Award, and Best Paper Awards at EWSN 2022, ICCPS 2019, SenSys 2013, and IPSN 2011.

Michael Breza is a Research Fellow in the department of computing at Imperial College, London. His research focuses on the relationship between communication systems and distributed algorithms for decentralised sensing and computing systems.

Vojtěch Spurný, Ph.D., is the Head of the Software Department at Fly4Future, where he oversees the development of advanced software for the autonomous deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). He specializes in designing and implementing complex multi-robot systems, effectively bridging the gap between cutting-edge academic research and industrial-grade drone solutions. Dr. Spurný earned his Ph.D. from the Czech Technical University in Prague, and his research on autonomous aerial deployment received 2nd place in the Werner von Siemens Award for the best technical dissertation in the Czech Republic. Dr. Spurný has an impressive track record in international robotics, having led teams to multiple 1st-place victories at the MBZIRC challenges in 2017 and 2020, as well as achieving high placements in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Previously, he was a visiting researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Laboratory. Currently, he leads the Research and Development for Fly4Future’s autonomous systems, focusing on delivering reliable, mission-critical aerial solutions. His contributions include over 25 publications and nearly 2,000 citations.

Xiaoyuan Ma is an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) system architect at SKF. Before leaping to industry, he was engaged in low-power wireless communication related research in Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, CAS and received his PhD from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. His current interest is to build resilient wireless energy-efficient intelligent IoT systems in the real world. He is also a TC member of IEEE IES Cloud and Wireless Systems for Industrial Applications.