Bio
Rute C. Sofia (PhD 2004) is the Industrial IoT Head at fortiss - research institute of the Free State of Bavaria for software intensive services and systems. She is also an Invited Associate Professor of University Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, and an Associate Researcher at ISTAR, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. Rute's research background has been developed on industrial and on academic context. She was a co-founder of the COPELABS research unit, and the COPELABS scientific director (2013-2017), where she was a Senior Researcher (2010-2019). She has co-founded the Portuguese startup Senception Lda (2013-2019), a startup focused on personal communication platforms.
Her current research interests are: network architectures and protocols; IoT; Edge computing; in-network computing; network mining. Rute holds over 60 peer-reviewed publications in her fields of expertise, and 9 patents. She is an ACM Europe Councilor (2021-2025); an ACM Senior member, an IEEE Senior Member. She was an IEEE ComSoc N2Women Awards co-chair (2020-2021).
Before fortiss, she was an Associate Professor (COPELABS/ULHT, wireless/user-centric networking; sensing; IoT); she co-lead as senior researcher the "Internet Architectures and Networking" area of UTM, INESC-TEC (07-10), focus on wireless/cellular network architectures and user-centric networking; she was (04-07) a senior research scientist in Siemens AG and Nokia-Siemens Networks GmbH, focusing on aspects such as: fixed-mobile convergence; carrier-grade Ethernet; QoS; IPv6 interoperability.
Rute holds a BEng in Informatics Engineering by Universidade de Coimbra (1995); M.Sc.(1999) and Ph.D. (2004) in Informatics by Universidade de Lisboa. During her PhD studies, she was a visiting scholar (2000-2003) at Northwestern University (ICAIR) and at University of Pennsylvania, MNLab, coordinated by Roch Guerin.
Technical Skills:
My background has been developed both in industry and in academy, focus on networking architectures and protocols. During the course of my dual carrier development and in addition to a deeper technical understanding of wireless, cellular, and fixed networks, I have gained a deeper understanding of both academic and industrial processes; innovation cycles; technology transfer processes, such as standardization. As Senception founder and CEO I have gained a deeper understanding on product development ; team management ; product innovation cycles. As COPELABS Scientific Coordinator I have gained knowledge in science management and in cooperating to build research teams from scratch. As COPELABS Director, I have acquired science management skills in terms of development of research infrastructures, from idea to proof-of-concept. I have also acquired skills in technology transfer models from academia to industry. My industrial background assisted the development of skills that bind innovation to product development. My main strengths in this context are : creative thinking ; driver for innovation ; leadership vision ; articulation of forefront projects from idea until a product stage.