Técnico Outstanding Teaching Award
Técnico Outstanding Teaching Award
The award criteria is based on student evaluations of teaching performance, which consists of a scale from 1 to 9, measured by the Técnico Course Unit Quality System (QUC). The award winners must have the highest score (9) in all evaluation criteria.
Nuno SantosTécnico Outstanding Teaching Award
2nd cicle of studies
2nd cicle of studies
Nuno Santos was born in Leiria in 1978. He completed his undergraduate (2001) and master’s (2006) courses in Informatics and Computer Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon. In the summer of 2010, he did an internship at Microsoft Research (MSR) in Redmond where he collaborated with the Mobility and Networking Research group. This collaboration would result in the publication of a patent in the area of security for mobile devices. In 2013, he completed his Ph.D. in Informatics and Computer Engineering at Saarland University / Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, in Germany. In 2018, he was a visiting researcher at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, at the Systems and Network Security group with whom he collaborated for six months on sabbatical.
He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at IST and belongs to the INESC-ID research center. At INESC-ID, he is a member of the Distributed, Parallel and Secure Systems (DPSS) research group, formerly called the Distributed Systems Group (GSD).
At IST he has lectured a wide range of courses in the area of Architectures and Operating Systems. For the Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing course, he developed a software emulator that has been used by several generations of students to test their mobile applications for the Android platform. In recent years he has been responsible for Cyber Forensic Security. In this course, he developed innovative methods for the laboratory component by which the students are exposed to realistic forensic investigation cases. To crack these cases, they must use specialized tools for digital proof analysis (for example, for recovery of deleted files or traffic analysis of network). For several times, he was distinguished with the award of Professor “Excellent” according to the IST QUC classification. In addition to his teaching activities, one of his pedagogical priorities is the monitoring of master’s and doctoral students, having supervised / co-supervised more than forty students, many of them exceptionally talented.
His research interests lie in the field of systems security. In this area, he covers a wide variety of topics, from the development of techniques to reinforce security infrastructures in operating and distributed systems, to the design of systems that protect privacy in the use of personal data and communications, through the creation of tools for the detection of software vulnerabilities. The guiding principle behind his research is a strong emphasis on the study of real-world computer security problems that have a high impact on people’s lives. Thanks to collaborations with many researchers from national and international institutions, and above all to the excellent work of his students, he has co-authored around fifty papers in conferences and journals. Some of his articles are highly cited, breaking some ground in the development of techniques for securing sensitive computations on the cloud and mobile devices. Nuno was the first researcher in Portugal to publish in the four most prestigious international conferences in the area of computer security. He received four awards for the best paper published in scientific conferences. He regularly serves in the program committees of conferences in his field.
Nuno Roma
Técnico Outstanding Teaching Award
1st cicle of studies
Nuno Roma was born in Entroncamento on January 5, 1975. He is married and has 2 children.
He graduated in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1998, at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), and got the Master and Doctor degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2001 and 2008, both by IST and under the supervision of Prof. Leonel Sousa.
He started teaching at IST in 2003 and he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (DEEC), where he has been responsible for several undergraduate and postgraduate courses on different topics related to computer architectures, high-performance and large-scale computing.
He was one of the proponents of two IST study plans: a Minor in “High-Performance Computing”, offered to all M.Sc. courses at IST; and a Specialization in “Computing Systems” of the M.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (MEEC). Besides these, he proposed 2 new courses from M.Sc. curricular plans and another 2 courses from Ph.D. curricular plans. He also defined the syllabus of another 4 courses that were created/reformulated for the curricular plans he has proposed.
Throughout his career, he has had a permanent concern to adopt innovative pedagogical methodologies, having led a Pedagogical Innovation Project (PIP) which resulted in the deployment of an e-learning system based on Moodle’s platform, interconnected to the IST centralized authentication system (Fenix), and which was subsequently made available to the whole DEEC community. He has promoted several pedagogical initiatives among the students, including the “BitChallenge” series of competitions, which he has been organizing for several years.
For 15 times, the IST Course Unit Quality (QUC) system awarded him the distinction of “Excellent Professor”.
As a complement to this teaching activity, he has supervised many undergraduate and graduate students, both from IST and from other national and foreign universities: 2 Post-Doctorates, 8 Doctorates, 66 Masters, and 6 Academic Internships.
He is an integrated researcher at INESC-ID, to which he belongs since 1997, and where he assumes the coordination of the High-Performance Computing Architectures and Systems (HPCAS) scientific area, integrating over 20 Ph.D. researchers. He leads and has been involved in several national and international projects. His primary research areas include computer architectures, parallel processing, and high-performance and energy-efficient computing.
He has established several collaborations with the industry, including AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), EDISOFT/Thales Group, and SIBS.
He has published over 120 articles in international scientific journals and conferences, many of them coauthored with researchers from foreign universities. He has received 7 Best Paper Awards.
He has served as associate and guest editor of several international scientific journals and coordinated the edition of 3 special issues related to his research area. He has also collaborated in the organization of several scientific conferences, not only through his participation in the respective organizing committees but also by organizing several international workshops and special sessions. He is a regular member of the program committee for nearly two dozen international scientific conferences.
Throughout his career, he has held various academic and scientific management duties, including 3 consecutive two-year terms as a member of the DEEC Executive Committee (responsible for the management of the teaching staff) and the coordination of the CERN-IST Protocol, a position he has held since 2015, involving the participation of over 80 IST collaborators working at CERN laboratories, representing an accumulated funding amounting to 2.5 million Euros. He is also a member of the Coordinating Committee of INESC-ID Scientific Council, where he has served for 4 consecutive two-year terms.
He is a senior member of the 3 professional organizations to which he belongs: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and Ordem dos Engenheiros de Portugal.