Position: Alumni

Federico Candela obtained his ICT degree from the Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria, completing an internship and his thesis at STMicroelectronics in July 2020. In November 2020, he obtained professional qualification and has been a registered member of the Reggio Calabria Order of Engineers since January 2021. In the same year, he was awarded a research grant to develop intelligent computer vision systems in collaboration with Co.re.com (Regional Communications Committee) Calabria and Agcom (National Communications Agency). In 2022, he embarked on his Ph.D. focused on Vision AI topics, collaborating with Tecnocampus Mataró near Barcelona, and currently with Northeastern University. Throughout his studies, he also founded a student association and organized activities such as visits to Google London, CERN Geneva, and ESA Amsterdam.

Gabriele Restuccia is a visiting PhD student in ICT at the Roux Institute, hailing from the University of Palermo, Italy. He obtained his Master’s in Engineering in Computer Science from Sapienza University of Rome and collaborated with the Freie University of Berlin on his thesis. Before his current endeavors, he was a Researcher at the National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications in Rome and was actively involved in the SPARTA EU H2020 project. His primary research areas encompass IoT, Machine Learning with a keen emphasis on Neural Networks, as well as software development and security network protocols specifically tailored for constrained devices.

Francesca Meneghello is a Research Fellow at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova (Italy). She received her Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering in 2022 from the same university. Her research interests include sensing-assisted algorithms for context- and energy-aware wireless networks, and communication-assisted approaches for remote radio frequency sensing through deep-learning architectures and signal processing. She received the 2022 GTTI Ph.D. award for Ph.D. Theses in the field of Communication Technologies and the Fall 2022 IEEE DataPort Dataset Upload Contest award in the Machine Learning category. She visited the MENTIS laboratory in 2023 with a Fulbright-Schuman visiting scholar fellowship.

Niloofar Bahadori received a B.Sc. in electrical engineering and an M.Sc. (Hons.) in radio frequency (RF) engineering from Isfahan University. She also received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from NCA&T State University. She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Northeastern University under the supervision of Dr. Francesco Restuccia. Her research focused on tackling challenges facing next-generation cellular (5G) and Wi-Fi (802.11ax) networks such as millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication, multi-user multi-input-multi-output (MU-MIMO), and Wi-Fi sensing. She developed analytical approaches, and heuristic algorithms, in addition to data-driven and machine learning-based approaches to solving complex wireless optimization problems. She currently is a Wireless System Engineer at Cisco Systems.

Riccardo Rusca got his Bachelor and Master Degree in Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Torino, in Italy. From November 2020 he is a PhD student in the same university under the supervision of Professor Claudio Casetti. His research is focused on crowd monitoring and city sensing techniques supported by next generation mobile networks. Furthermore, he participated on the 6G flagship Hexa-X project, focusing on Federated Learning for IoT devices in Smart Cities context to collaboratively learn optimal resource allocation given traffic demand.

Fabio Busacca received the Ph.D. degree in Information and Communication Technologies from the University of Palermo, Italy, in 2022. He is currently an assistant professor at the University of Catania, Italy. His main research interests are LPWAN protocols for the IoT, with a specific focus on the LoRa protocol, Artificial Intelligence and Game Theory applied to next-generation communication networks, and Underwater Acoustic Communications.

Francesco Raviglione received his bachelor degree in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Torino in 2016. He then obtained a master degree in Mechatronic Engineering, in December 2018, in Politecnico di Torino, focusing, when choosing between the different second year courses, on embedded systems, automotive controls and networking technologies for mechatronics systems.

Starting from January 2019 and until April 2019 he had a grant in Politecnico di Torino, under the supervision of Professor Claudio Ettore Casetti, working on the performance evaluation of IEEE 802.11p-compatible wireless cards and on open source solutions for vehicular communications.
He was then on 6 months pre-Ph.D. grant under the supervision of Professor Claudio Ettore Casetti, from May 1st 2019, joining the TNG group and officially starting his Ph.D. on November 1st 2019.

He concluded his Ph.D. cum laude in December 2022, presenting a thesis titled “Open Platforms for Connected Vehicles”, and he is now an Assistant Professor with time contract at the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications (DET).
From October 2021 to April 2022, he was a visiting Ph.D. Student at the Roux Institute at Northeastern University, in Portland, ME, USA, under the supervision of Professor Francesco Restuccia. During his visit, he worked on an innovative framework combining multiple technologies for reliable vehicular communications and Vehicular Edge Intelligence.

As main research interests, he is working in the field of developing and evaluating platforms able to provide vehicular connectivity (both cellular, C-V2X, and DSRC – Dedicated Short-Range Communications), in different scenarios, and on open source, customizable, solutions for wireless and vehicular networking use cases. He is also one of the developers of the ms-van3t vehicular networking simulation and emulation framework.

Marco Cominelli is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Brescia, Italy. He received the M.Sc. in Telecommunications Engineering in 2019, and the Ph.D. in Information Engineering in 2023, both from the University of Brescia. He was a visiting student at the University of Edinburgh and at Northeastern University. His research interests include the study of device-free wireless sensing techniques and their impact on users’ security and privacy.

Corrado Puligheddu is an Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy, since 2023. His research interests include 5G networks, Open RAN and Machine Learning. Puligheddu received his Ph.D. in Electrical, Electronics and Communication Engineering from Politecnico di Torino in 2022. He obtained the B.S and M.S. in Computer Engineering from the same institution in 2017 and 2019 respectively.