New PhDs in INESC Porto

INESC Porto is investing more and more in the professional growth of its collaborators. Right now, we have 80 PhDs. The most recent are Naing Win OO of the Power Systems Unit (USE) and Ricardo Morla of the Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM).

Naing Win OO obtained the degree of Doctor in the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) on 16 June. The thesis was supervised by Vladimiro Miranda.

The dissertation, entitled “Multi-Energy Retail Market Simulation with Autonomous Intelligent Agents" was approved by unanimity. The jury was chaired by Eugénio da Costa Oliveira of FEUP and included Gerry Sheble, IEEE Fellow, University of Portland (Oregon), USA, and Julian Barquin, IIT - Universidad Pontificia Comillas de Madrid, Spain.

Ricardo Morla presented and defended his thesis in the Computation Department of the University of Lancaster, U.K, on 28 June. He was supervised by Nigel Davies of the University of Lancaster. The jury was integrated by Albrecht Schmidt, external examiner of the University of Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) and keith Cheverest, internal examiner of the University of Lancaster.


The title of the thesis was “Towards Interference-Free Deployment of Ubicomp Systems” and the objective was to explore the problem of the interference in Ubiquitous Computation Systems – also known as pervasive computing, ambient intelligence or reactive ambient. As a consumer buys new software or hardware components for his intelligent house, it is possible that the exact configuration of the house’s components has not been tested and that new components interfere with old components.

Given the special gravity of the problem of the interference in ambient intelligence, the lack of solutions to prevent interference and the lack of devices that help the researchers develop those solutions, this thesis presents and evaluates a framework with the main concepts of interference as well as a set of tools based on simulation that support the interference test.