Iacopo Carreras Research Interests

My research interests include Wireless Sensor Networks, pervasive computing, mobility models and bio-inspired modeling. Mobile Computing Opportunistic Communications The proliferation of mobile technologies (such as mobile phones, gaming consoles and MP3 players) equipped with short-range wireless connectivity (such as Bluetooth and WiFi) has encouraged the development of applications that allow users to produce, access and share digital resources in a wide number of everyday occasions and without the support of a fixed infrastructure. The development of such applications presents challenges in terms of both user interaction and technical feasibility, as users' behaviors needs to be taken into account, especially the mobility of users and the variability of contexts traversed, and technological limitations, especially in terms of battery/processing power and wireless bandwidth, cannot be underestimated. Recently, significant attention has been devoted to mobile application scenarios, where the carriers of information are represented by people with their personal handheld devices. In this case, the characteristics of the social network in which the data is being diffused is extrememly important and can significantly influence the performance of such systems. This consideration has led to the studies on how to exploit social interactions in mobile systems. What appears to be missing from current studies on opportunistic communication systems is the realization that while mobility and proximal encounters might provide opportunities for improving the performance of the network, these mobile encounters are inherently wed to the social world in which they take place. Therefore, opportunistic communication systems must take into account the types of applications which they are meant to support, and to recognize the significance of the users' preferences regarding the data that they are interested in accessing and sharing through these systems. Biologically-inspired Computing Recently, a number of approaches inspired by biological mechanisms and phenomena have been proposed as a strategy to handle the complexity of massively distributed systems such as the Internet, or wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. The goal of bio-inspired approaches is to discover and to adapt biological methods to technical solutions that are showing similarly high stability, adaptability, and scalability, as biological entities often have. I'm particularly interested in evolutionary computing approaches.