Dear PS members,
Wishing you all a joyful holiday season and a peaceful, prosperous New Year!✨
2024 has been quite a challenging year for us. In the first half, we were deeply shocked when we learned about Paul's passing. I want to take a moment to express our heartfelt gratitude for Paul. He was a role model for each of us. We feel his absence greatly and miss him dearly. We aim to honour him during the Smart Surroundings event we will host in 2025.
I’d like to provide a brief overview of our PS milestones from this year (forgive me if I overlooked anything, and feel free to point it out), and let's work together to make 25 better!
Defences and Graduations
6 PhD defences! Congratulations to Dr. Nikita Sharma, Dr. Rob Bemthuis, Dr. Hamed Darbandi, Dr. Jeroen Klein Brinke, Dr. Bram Ton, and Dr. Sabari Anbalagan for successfully defending their theses. We’re looking forward to even more defences in 2025! Many MSc students completed their theses under the supervision of PS members.
New Members
Four new EngD/PhD students have joined the PS group: Fatemeh and Egemen are involved in the Ecologic project, Qianqian is working on the 6G FNS project, and Ronan is part of the Cisco CAL Project. Additionally, as a returning member, I have rejoined the group. A new EngD student is expected to start soon on the Ecologic project, and we are currently in the hiring process for two new PhD students for the Mosaic and Steadfast projects. On a joyful note, two new babies have been welcomed: Sabari's daughter and Mario's son!
Publications
Over 40 publications have been accepted or made available online, including on Arxiv. https://www.utwente.nl/en/eemcs/ps/publications/
Awards
Maha won the Best Paper Award at ECPLF 2024, and Schisin won the Best Poster Award at the FREE Consortium Day. The Innovative Educational Grant for the Pervasive Computing course was awarded to Jeroen, Rob, and Paul.
New Projects and New Proposals
STEADFAST (Alex and Jan), MOSAIC (Duc), and PROJECT CAL with Cisco (Peter)began in 2024. Takeoff grants were awarded to Canine (Duc), Ecocheck (Rob), and The Intelligent Nestbox (Jacob). We submitted more than 10 research proposals in 2024; 2 were rejected, but we remain hopeful for the pending ones.
More …
Lisette delivered her inaugural lecture on smart ecological monitoring of aquatic systems.
Rob, along with Faiza, launched the Process Science Community at the University of Twente.
Yanqiu and Deepak presented a keynote at the IEEE TrustSense Workshop, and I presented another at the IWOAR Workshop. We will be organizing the 2025 edition of the workshop here at UT in September.
Two members of the ComNets from TU Hamburg visited PS.
I am thankful to all members for their support. Our efforts to reach our goals for the upcoming year remain steadfast 😊
Best regards and happy holidays,
Ozlem
