Internationally reputed young Spanish networking researcher comes home

03 October 2016

IMDEA Networks has announced that Dr. Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez will join the Institute in October 2016 in the role of Research Assistant Professor. He is a bright Spanish scientist with a successful track record in top academic institutions and industry labs abroad, who has decided to join the Madrid-based research institute as the optimal location to consolidate his research career.

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Dr. Vallina-Rodriguez has a proven capacity to engineer team work and successfully launch research initiatives, what makes him a valuable asset to the research team at IMDEA Networks. His research interests are well aligned with the efforts of his new colleagues to create the communication networks of the future. Dr. Vallina-Rodriguez is particularly focused on analytical measurements of networked systems, with a strong interest in understanding the performance, privacy and security challenges present in emerging mobile technologies.

Many of the performance, privacy, and security aspects of networked systems are not well understood yet, not only by the average user, but also by developers, regulators, and even ISPs. Dr. Vallina-Rodriguez engages with both industry players and regulators to identify and tackle real-world problems with rigorous network measurements and analysis. This empirical approach allows Dr. Vallina-Rodriguez to understand the system dynamics in order to build effective solutions. Often times, the outcome of his research is available for the public in the form of tools and applications that help average users to understand certain features of their network and devices. Two good examples are the ICSI Netalyzr network troubleshooting tool for Android and the ICSI Haystack project to expose mobile trackers to users. He will continue to develop his current research line at IMDEA Networks in an attempt to increase the transparency of mobile systems and applications.

Dr. Vallina-Rodriguez received his degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Oviedo in 2007, which he extended with a 6-month stay at the University of Cambridge to complete his degree dissertation. In 2008, Dr. Vallina-Rodriguez joined Vodafone R&D, returning to the University of Cambridge to complete his Ph.D. program under the supervision of Prof. Jon Crowcroft. In July 2013, Dr. Vallina-Rodriguez started work as a Post-Doc at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley (California), becoming a Research Scientist and Principal Investigator one year after. During his doctoral studies Dr. Vallina-Rodriguez also interned in world-class industry research labs, such as Deutsche Telekom Labs in Berlin (Germany) and the scientific group at Telefonica Research (Spain).