about me
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My full CV can be found here.
For 6 years lived in Ann Arbor, MI (US) where he learned not only fluent English, but had his first contact with computer networks. Returned to Brazil and in 1998, following high school graduation, was admitted to the Computer Science course of the Federal University of Bahia (www.ufba.br). While still a freshman got invited to the student run company (Junior Enterprise – INFOJr – www.infojr.ufba.br) where he participated in many software oriented projects. Few months later was already in charge of the marketing department of the company, being responsible for the planning and organization of all the marketing strategies. Afterward got elected to become the financial and administrative director where he headed all financial operations, client negotiations and helped re-structure the company, focusing on what the market was currently requesting: web-enabled applications. Finally, became director of the Internet department of the company where led efforts to standardize web system development, evaluate new technologies and plan member recycling projects. He also became one of the main speakers of the company while in Junior Enterprise Conferences throughout Brazil.
Further developed his entrepreneur side by taking part of business courses given by the Euvaldo Lodi Institute (www.iel.cni.org.br). While still in the undergraduate course, started his own company – Sidekick (www.sidekick.com.br) – focused on web and embedded software development. During the last 10 years he has been involved with programming with the most influential web enabled languages and has also been immersed in C/C++ embedded software and hardware development, including a few real-time and many linux kernel drivers projects.
Right after he received his bachelors degree, he dedicated one year to sole industry work. But it was not long before he got seduced by the first graduate program in Mechatronics in Brazil also at Federal University of Bahia. The idea of researching integrated systems that included mechanical, electronic and software components fascinated him. In no time he had already published an article in one of his favorite research topics: human-computer interaction. His primary research topic — wireless networks — were nothing new as these were commonplace, but a network created through self-organization by mobile nodes without the need of any kind of infrastructure sounded almost as if taken from a science fiction novel. He would later learn that these were denominated mobile ad-hoc networks, or simply MANETs. Continuous research uncovered the many unresolved issues in dependable mobile computing, including the lack of basic fundamental communication primitives such as reliable broadcasting for MANETs, and this is what his thesis would focus on. In it he evaluated – through the aid of simulation experiments – how well broadcasting protocols behaved when under a more realistic failure model characterized by omission faults. The study conducted showed that most protocols are highly impacted by failures and are not capable of maintaining high delivery rates. Some even exhibited coverage levels that are unreasonable to expect from broadcasting protocols when placed in such a scenario.
However, his research also found a limited number of protocols that were able to sustain higher delivery rates, regardless of failures. In his thesis he also presented a study and classification of strategies used by these protocols in order to ensure message delivery beyond best-effort. Perhaps the most interesting result was the proposal of a new mechanism that helps to enhance the capability of broadcasting algorithms to deal with omission faults in a scalable way. By relying on the mechanism, nodes are able to identify neighboring links that are more reliable prior to transmission. The proposed solution is capable of ensuring good delivery rates, in spite of failures, while maintaining relatively low end-to-end delays. An additional five publications were produced from this work.
After finishing his masters’ he continued in private consulting with his company while also teaching CS programming and distributed systems undergraduate courses at UNIME, an university in Brazil. However, since September 2008, he has been working with Dr. Dharma Agrawal and other very bright students at the Center for Distributed and Mobile Computing at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio pursuing his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering. His current research focuses on dependable wireless ad hoc networks and related issues, including fundamental communication primitives such as reliable broadcasting, heterogeneous networks and wireless mesh networks.