“IMDEA Networks it's not only a great place where to work but also a great place where to live every day”

Get to know better our Research Associate Professor Marco Fiore in this second part of the interview given by the leader of the Networks Data Science Group

05 January 2021

In this second interview, Marco Fiore, Research Associate Professor at IMDEA Networks, tells us the importance of having an open mind in order to grow professionally. Besides, he talks about the areas of interest he sees opening up in the future. As the head of the Networks Data Science Group, he is focused on mobile networks and data science.

What impact has your experience working abroad had in your career?

I have had nicer experiences in some countries or some organizations than others. But I do not regret working at any of those places because in any case, even when the experience is not excellent, you still can learn something from a new research environment, a new working environment. So having visited a lot of different places and having worked in a lot of different places helps you having a very broad vision of which are all the good aspects and negative aspects that can affect your work. And then you can pick and say: ‘okay I want my research group to work in this way or that way that I like and I want to avoid those errors that I saw people made in the past’.

What is the present and what will be the future of your research?

My research over the past few years and the research that my group is conducting at IMDEA Networks is focused on topics at the interface between mobile networks and data science. What we do is applying data science tools to help improve the operation of mobile networks. This includes data mining knowledge, discovery machine learning, artificial intelligence that are used to design data-driven networking solutions and the network intelligence that will allow future generations of networks to be fully automated.

Concerning future search directions, I think that we need to do a lot in terms of network intelligence because this is really at a very early stage. We need to understand how to best exploit the data that is available in the network to self-orchestrate resources in the network, as an example. There is a lot of work to do there and I will keep working on that definitely.

What aspects of IMDEA Networks are most attractive to PhD students?

I think that the kind of research I do is fairly multidisciplinary. It brings together machine learning, data mining, data analysis, and network engineering. We also have contacts with demographists, sociologists, geographers, so this is a pretty enriching experience. I really welcome those kind of students who have a broad set of interests, even beyond engineering and that is for the technical aspect. Then of course, I think that you want to carry out your PhD in an excellent institution and IMDEA Networks is. This is because you are surrounded by very good researchers, talking about the professors but also postdocs and PhDs themselves. IMDEA Networks it is not only a great place where to work, it is also a great place where to live every day. People here know how to work, but also know how to have fun and create a nice environment every day.