Members

Leaders

PI (CWC): Assist. Prof. Hirley Alves received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Federal University of Technology-Paraná (UTFPR), Brazil, in 2010 and 2011, respectively, both in electrical engineering, and the dual D.Sc. degree from the University of Oulu and UTFPR, in 2015. In 2017, he was an Adjunct Professor in machine-type wireless communications with the Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC), University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland. In 2019, he joined CWC as an Assistant Professor and is currently the Head of the Machine-type Wireless Communications Group. He is actively working on massive connectivity and ultra-reliable low latency communications for future wireless networks, 5GB and 6G, full-duplex communications, and physical-layer security. He leads the URLLC activities for the 6G Flagship Program. He is a co-recipient of the 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Wireless Communications and Systems (ISWCS) Best Student Paper Award, and 2019 IEEE European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC) Best Student Paper Award and a co-recipient of the 2016 Research Award from the Cuban Academy of Sciences. He has been the organizer, chair, and TPC and tutorial lecturer for several renowned international conferences. He is the General Chair of the ISWCS’2019 and the General Co-Chair of the 1st 6G Summit, Levi 2019, and ISWCS 2021.

PI (LUT): Pedro H. J. Nardelli received the B.S. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the State University of Campinas, Brazil, in 2006 and 2008, respectively. In 2013 he received his doctoral degree from University of Oulu, Finland, and State University of Campinas following a dual-degree agreement. Nowadays he is assistant professor in IoT in energy systems (tenure track) at the Laboratory of Control Engineering and Digital Systems, School of Energy Systems, Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland, as well as adjunct professor (docent) in information processing and communication strategies for energy systems from at Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu.

Doctoral students

M.Sc. Arthur Sena is a doctoral candidate at LUT. He received the B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and the M.Sc. degree in Teleinformatics Engineering from the Federal University of Ceará, Brazil, in 2017 and 2019, respectively. From 2014 to 2015, he studied Computer Engineering as an exchange student at Illinois Institute of Technology, USA. His research interests include signal processing, mobile communications systems, non-orthogonal multiple access techniques, intelligent metasurfaces, and massive MIMO.

M.Sc. Daniel Gutierrez Rojas is a doctoral student at the School of Energy Systems at LUT University, Finland. He received the B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Antioquia, Colombia in 2016 and the M.Sc. degree in Protection of Power Systems University of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2017. From 2017 to 2019, he worked as security of operation and fault analyst for Colombia’s National electrical operator. His research interests include predictive maintenance based on Industrial IoT, power systems, microgrids, mobile communication systems and electrical protection systems, as well as machine learning. He is currently working with microgrid protection using wireless communication including tests at LUT Green Campus and simulations of industrial processes.

M.Sc. Dick Melgarejo (LUT) is a doctoral candidate at LUT. He was a senior wireless system engineer at CPqD/Brazil, where he participated in projects on planning and designing IoT solutions that best fit in niche markets such as rural areas and cane tracking using RFID. Previously, he worked as a wireless communication system researcher at Nokia Institute of Technology, Manaus, Brazil. He holds a M.Sc. in electrical engineer from PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, and a Bachelor degree in electronics engineer from San Marcos National University, Peru. He has strong background in deployment and testing wireless systems in ns3, in the different IoT technologies (LoRa, SigFox, and LTE/WiFi) and in the LTE standard.

M.Sc. Iran Ramezanipour (CWC) is a doctoral student in CWC. Her main research areas include communication systems for smart grids and spectrum sharing in IoT-based communication systems. She received her M.Sc. Degree in Wireless Communications Engineering from University of Oulu, Finland in 2016 and her B.Sc. Degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Karaj Azad University, Iran in 2011.

M.Sc. Maurício Tomé (CWC) is a doctoral student in CWC Finland and received his M.Sc. in Power Systems from the University of Campinas in 2014. His work was about the impact of residential water heating in the formation of the “peak hour” in the Brazilian power grid. His main interests are power and energy measurement signal analysis and communication strategies. He is expected to graduate in 2019, when he plan to move to LUT as a postdoc.

M.Sc. Mohammad Shehab (CWC) has obtained his B. Sc from Alexandria University in 2011. He worked as TA at Alexandria University and the Arab Academy in Egypt from 2012-2015. He obtained two M. Sc degrees from the Arab Academy and University of Oulu in 2014 and 2017, respectively. He is resuming his doctoral studies with Oulu's Centre for Wireless Communications since October 2017 and working on future wireless networks with focus on energy efficiency in Machine Type Communication. His work so far resulted in 10 conference papers, 4 journal papers, and 1 patent. Mohammad won the best student paper award in ISWCS 2017, and the Nokia foundation award consecutively for 2018 and 2019.

Fahad Qasmi (CWC) received the B.Eng. degree from the Mehran UET Jamshoro, Pakistan, in 2005, and the MS. degree from the University of Oulu, in 2018. Since 2018, he has been a Doctoral Student, University of Oulu. His research interests lie in the areas of traffic models for massive MTC, QoS provisioning, big data for resource allocation in wireless networks, and energy efficient transmission in 5G communication systems.

Irfan Muhammad (CWC) received B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Pakistan, in 2015. He received M.Sc degree in Wireless Communication Engineering from University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland in 2018. He worked as a trainee in Nokia in 2017. He has been a Doctoral student and working as a researcher in Centre for Wireless Communication, University of Oulu since 2018. His research interests comprise MTC, URLLC, physical layer security, and QoS provisioning.

Senior researchers

Dr. Carlos H. Morais de Lima is a senior research fellow at UOULU with experience in academia and industry R&D. From 2006 to 2007, he worked at INdT, Brazil. From 2014 to 2018, he was Assist. Prof. at UNESP, Brazil. In CWC, he worked in many national and EU projects such as Celtic Plus Sharing, FP6 PULSERS, as well as FP7 EUWB, BeFemto, and DUPLO projects.

Dr. Onel L. A. López (CWC) was awarded with silver (2003) and bronze (2005) medals in the high school national competitions of Mathematics in Cuba. He got his B.Sc. (1st class honors) degree in Telecommunications and Electrical Engineering from the Central University of Las Villas (UCLV), Santa Clara, Cuba in 2013. From September 2013 to January 2016, he was a telematics specialist in the Cuban Telecommunications Company (ETECSA). In February of 2017, he obtained the M.Sc. degree from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Curitiba, Brazil with a grant from CAPES/CNPq. In March, he joined the Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC), University of Oulu, where he obtained his PhD in 2019. He was awarded the Nokia Foundation Grant in 2017 for his research on data aggregation and non-orthogonal multiple access. His research interests are ultra-reliable, low latency communications for future networks, energy harvesting setups, and efficient access techniques for massive machine-type communications.

International collaborators

Constantinos B. Papadias is the Executive Director of the Research, Technology and Innovation Network (RTIN) of The American College of Greece, where he is also a faculty member, since Feb. 1, 2020. Prior to this, he was the Scientific Director / Dean of Athens Information Technology (AIT), in Athens, Greece, where he was also Head of the Broadband Wireless and Sensor Networks (B-WiSE) Research Group. He is also Adjunct Professor at Aalborg University and at the University of Cyprus. He received the Diploma of Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1991 and the Doctorate degree in Signal Processing (highest honors) from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST), Paris, France, in 1995. He was a researcher at Institut Eurécom (1992-1995), Stanford University (1995-1997) and Bell Labs (as Member of Technical Staff from 1997-2001 and as Technical Manager from 2001-2006). He was also Adjunct Professor at Columbia University (2004-2005) and Carnegie Mellon University (2006-2011). He has published over 200 papers and 4 books and has received over 9000 citations for his work, with an h-index of 44. He has also made standards contributions and holds 12 patents. He was a member of the Steering Board of the Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF) from 2002-2006, a member and industrial liaison of the IEEE’s Signal Processing for Communications Technical Committee from 2003-2008 and a National Representative of Greece to the European Research Council’s IDEAS program from 2007-2008. He has served as member of the IEEE Communications Society’s Fellow Evaluation and Awards Committees, as well as an Associate Editor for various journals. He has contributed to the organization of several conferences, including, as General Chair, the IEEE CTW 2016 and the IEEE SPAWC 2018 workshops. He has acted as Technical Coordinator in several EU projects such as: CROWN in the area of cognitive radio; HIATUS in the area of interference alignment; HARP in the area of remote radio heads and ADEL in the area of licensed shared access. He is currently the Research Coordinator of the European Training Network project PAINLESS on the topic of energy autonomous infrastructure-less wireless networks and the Technical Coordinator of the EU CHIST-ERA project FIREMAN on the topic of predictive maintenance via machine type wireless communication systems. His distinctions include the Bell Labs President’s Award (2002), the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Young Author Best Paper Award (2003), a Bell Labs Teamwork Award (2004), his recognition as a “Highly Cited Greek Scientist” (2011), two IEEE conference paper awards (2013, 2014) and a “Best Booth” Award at EUCNC (2016). He has also been shortlisted twice for the Bell Labs Prize (2014, 2019). He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society for 2012-2013. He was appointed Fellow of IEEE in 2013 and Fellow of the European Alliance of Innovation (EAI) in 2019.

Prof. Petar Popovski (adviser) is Professor in Wireless Communications at Aalborg University, at the Department of Electronic Systems and a Fellow of IEEE. Prof. Popovski leads the research group MassM2M, which covers the broad area of wireless communications and networks, focusing on wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity and 5G wireless systems. Prof. Popovski is a holder of a Consolidator Grant (2015-2020) from the European Research Council (ERC) and a recipient of the Danish Elite Researcher Award (2016). Prof. Popovski’s research interests are in the area of communication theory, wireless system design and information theory, with activities focused on 5G wireless, massive M2M communication for the Internet of Things, ultra-reliable wireless communication, communication with short packets, low-latency communication, dense wireless networks, as well as mmWave communication. MassM2M research group focus on three research areas: protocol reengineering, information and coding theory and communication for smart grid. MassM2M arises due to the fact that wireless connectivity enables mass deployment of M2M interconnections, both in terms of number of devices and variety of applications. MassM2M works on wireless protocols and transmission schemes that will enable a mass and dependable M2M communication. There is a need to investigate the fundamental principles of communication system design that correspond to the novel requirements posed by MassM2M.

Assoc. Prof. Daniel B. da Costa (visiting researcher in LUT, Nokia Visiting Professor grantee) received the B.Sc. degree in Telecommunications from the Military Institute of Engineering (IME), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2003, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering, Area: Telecommunications, from the University of Campinas, SP, Brazil, in 2006 and 2008, respectively. Prof. da Costa is currently Editor of the IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS & TUTORIALS, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, IEEE ACCESS, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, and EURASIP JOURNAL ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKING. He has served as Lead Guest Editor and Guest Editor of several Journal Special Issues. He has been involved on the Organizing Committee of several conferences. He is currently the Latin American Chapters Coordinator of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. Currently, he is the Chair of the Special Interest Group on "Energy Harvesting Cognitive Radio Networks" in IEEE Cognitive Networks Technical Committee.

Dr. Jules M. Moualeu (visiting researcher at LUT) received the M.Sc.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, in 2008 and 2013, respectively. During the Ph.D. degree, he was a Visiting Scholar with Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, under the Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship Program (CCSP) offered by the Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT). He joined the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand at Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2015, and is also an affiliate Assistant Professor with Concordia University. He is currently an NRF Y-Rated Researcher. His current research interests include cooperative and relay communications, cognitive radio networks, energy harvesting, multiple-input multiple-output systems, non-orthogonal multiple access schemes, and physical-layer security. He received the Exemplary Reviewer Certificate of IEEE Communications Letters in 2018. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Access. He visited LUT during Spring 2019 funded by LUT Foundation.