To maintain its pace and quality of research, CISTER regularly intakes high quality research students using competitive calls. During 2017, CISTER launched multiple calls for PhD student positions in the area of Real-Time & Embedded Computing (RTES). The CISTER selection committee, made up of its research members, received over hundred applications from twenty countries spread all over world. Out of these, with a rigorous multi-stage evaluation process, five highly motivated candidates were selected.

The selected candidates are from prestigious institutions in Chile, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan and Russia. CISTER intends to announce further calls this year for motivated research candidates in RTES.

The IEEE Young Professionals program is run for members who are in an early stage of their career. It offers networking events with technical experts and industry leaders as well as a host of volunteering roles.

CISTER PhD candidate Shashank Gaur has been part of this leadership team for eight years. His role is to form partnerships across IEEE technical societies to find new opportunities for Young Professionals members. That includes helping develop micro volunteering roles for those who want to get involved with the organization but lack sufficient time. At CISTER, Gaur's PhD work focuses on context-aware computing in wireless sensor networks and the Internet of Things.

ACM Speakers represent a broad range of companies, colleges and universities. They are thought leaders, speaking on important current topics in computing. CISTER researcher Anis Koubaa has now joined this list.

Along with his positions at CISTER and at Prince Sultan University, he also holds various advisory positions. He is the Editor in Chief of the Robotics Software Engineering topic of the International Journal of Advanced Robotics Systems, Associate Editor in the Cyber-Physical Journal (Taylor & Francis). He is the author of six books with Springer on robots, sensor networks and Robot Operating Systems (ROS). He is the author of more than 190 journal and conference publications, and one patent. He has also received several research grants as principal investigator.

His current research deals with providing solutions towards the integration of robots and drones into the Internet of Things (IoT) and clouds, in the context of cloud robotics. His research interests also include Robot Operating System (ROS), Robotic Software Engineering, Wireless communication for the IoT, real-time communication, safety and security for cloud robotics, intelligent algorithms’ design for mobile robots, and multi-robot task allocation.

Humberto Carvalho, advised by CISTER researchers Geoffrey Nelissen and Eduardo Tovar, successfully defended his Master thesis with a perfect grade of 20 (on a scale of 20).

Humberto’s thesis was on the topic of "Scheduling High Criticality Real-Time Systems". Particularly, he focused on issues faced by the avionics industry. He proposed a new solution for a relevant problem in systems with stringent isolation requirements between applications, as is the case in aircrafts. The solution was to generate a cyclic executive schedule that optimizes the number of context switches between avionic partitions.

We wish the best to Humberto for his future career.

CISTER director Eduardo Tovar gave a keynote at the 7th Brazilian Symposium on Computing Systems Engineering (SBESC 2017), in Curitiba, Brazil. The Symposium is an initiative of the research community originally associated with three workshops on Operating Systems (WSO), Embedded Systems (WSE) and Real-Time Systems (WTR), acknowledging the strong synergy between these three areas. His talk “Information processing for extreme dense sensing - timeliness and scalability issues” was well received and ended with a lively Q&A.
He also presented the paper “Formal Verification of AADL Models Using UPPAAL”, authored by Fernando Gonçalves (UFSC - Florianópolis, SC, Brazil), CISTER researchers David Pereira and Eduardo Tovar, and Leandro Becker (UFSC - Florianópolis, SC, Brazil).