A day of direct contact with technological research

Students from the 2nd year of Bachillerato visited the IMDEA Networks facilities

14 January 2022

IMDEA Networks organized, on Thursday, January 13, a new day of encounter with research for a group of high school students from the Colegio Sagrado Corazón de Jesús in Madrid. Under the pertinent preventive health security measures, the group was able to enjoy a morning of knowledge of various aspects of the work carried out in the institution.

The event began with a brief introduction of IMDEA Networks by Research Professor Antonio Fernández Anta, which continued with an informative explanation of the functioning and results of the CoronaSurveys project, an international initiative promoted by the researcher that applies mathematical and statistical methods to approach the true incidence of the coronavirus in global health.

Pelayo Vallina, PhD student, then proceeded to reflect on the risks of privacy on the Internet. In this talk, essential concepts were introduced to understand how our data is captured and the possible consequences for users. Finally, technological alternatives that are very respectful of users’ privacy were presented, such as the use of ‘privacy-by-design’ browsers or search engines like DuckDuckGo.

Vallina also spoke about the study he carried out together with other IMDEA Networks researchers on the online porn ecosystem. The team analyzed every day the most trafficked websites in the world throughout 2018. Their analysis showed the precision of the Internet to know what every human being does in their privacy.

The day also included a visit to the 5TONIC lab, an international benchmark in research on 5G applications, with a presentation led by Neftalí González, Systems Administrator, who also had the opportunity to tell the attendees how the Institute’s ICT systems operate.

The LiFi Lab was also visited, so it was possible to check the relevance of the research being carried out there, thanks to the explanations of the PhD student Javier Talavante. In this lab they are working to enable battery-free IoT devices through the convergence of two emerging technologies: LiFi and radio frequency (RF) backscatter.

Professor Laura González Sáinz valued very positively the possibility “to attend such informative presentations about IMDEA Networks in general and about aspects such as privacy on the Internet, the monitoring of the COVID-19 incident, the development of 5G, the Visible Light Communication system and how to work in the computer systems of an institution such as yours. It was a great experience for our Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) course”.