The University of Modena and Reggio Emilia is proud to announce its upcoming IWES PhD School on Embedded Systems, taking place Monday, September 15 to Wednesday, September 17, 2025, at the University of Modena campus in Modena, Italy.

This intensive three-day program offers students, researchers, and professionals a unique opportunity to dive deep into the design, implementation, and management of cutting-edge CPS, complex systems where physical devices and cyber components seamlessly interact.

Logistics

Here are some logistical details:

• Lectures will be held at
  • the Department of Physical, Computer, and Mathematical Sciences, Mathematics Building, Via Campi 213/B - 41125 Modena, Italy.
  • Classroom (M1.4) - First floor.
  • The lecture hall is currently to be confirmed but the location is certain; Modena PhD students/researchers will put up signs in the office to make access to the lecture hall easier.
• Parking is available in the department (free of charge) and can be accessed from Via Araldi 88 (Google Maps)
• Those arriving from the station can also reach the department by public transportation, specifically:
  • Bus Line 4 Dir. Vaciglio Nord (Stop Vignolese - Bivio Campi) + 500m walk;
  • Bus Line 7 Dir. Gottardi (Stop Campi Università) + 300m walk.
  • Ticket can be made on the bus by contactless card (€1.5 ATM or credit card).

Program Highlights

Lectures will be delivered by leading experts from top Italian universities, combining theoretical insights with hands-on sessions. Attendees will receive course materials and software resources to enhance learning.

Edge-to-Cloud continuum: a viable technology infrastructure

Teacher: Tullio Vardanega, University of Padua

This course explores technology solutions that support the runtime infrastructure concept called "Edge-to-Cloud continuum," where reliable and secure distributed applications can execute on dynamic, opportunistic, ephemeral federations of compute nodes aggregated according to latency, privacy, reliability, and resource availability needs. The course includes a hands-on part with open software resources provided by the instructor.

Handling real-time communications with Time-Sensitive Networking for automotive and industrial applications

Teacher: Gaetano Patti, University of Catania

The course provides an overview of recent advances in Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standards in industrial and automotive contexts. It covers innovative solutions for managing diverse real-time flows with different timing constraints and arrival patterns.

Confidential Computing (in the cloud)

Teacher: Giovanni Mazzeo, University of Parthenope

This course offers an overview of business models and enabling technologies in cloud computing. It focuses on confidentiality issues in the cloud, emphasizing protection against attacks by highly privileged software (e.g., Operating System, Hypervisor) and users (e.g., System Administrator, Cloud Provider). Theoretical topics are enriched with application domain examples.

Modeling, monitoring and enforcement of application behavior for embedded systems

Teacher: Andrea Saracino, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna Pisa, TeCIP

This course introduces formal methodologies for representing applications, daemons, and firmware behaviors to prevent unwanted and malicious actions. Approaches presented include Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) and Contract Based Security.

Feel free to Reject: The Enabling Condition for Trustworthy Decision-Making Systems

Teacher: Tommaso Zoppi, University of Florence

This course argues that trustworthy decision-making systems require collaboration among multiple independent decisors, self-awareness, reliable system design with mitigation strategies, and full input-output traceability rather than focusing solely on new ML algorithms or controllers.

Wireless technologies for real-time Industrial IoT applications

Teacher: Luca Leonardi, University of Catania

The course explores wireless technologies like LoRa and BLE in industrial contexts, presenting research challenges and cutting-edge solutions. It covers medium access schemes that support real-time traffic flows and their performance.

Introduction to Multicore and Heterogeneous Real-Time Scheduling

Teacher: Daniel Casini, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna

This course covers basic concepts of scheduling modern real-time workloads on multicore and heterogeneous platforms. Topics include predictability issues with shared hardware resources and modeling offloading operations to hardware accelerators using self-suspending tasks.

Real-Time Performance of real-time applications developed using ROS 2

Teacher: Daniel Casini, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna

The course reviews how ROS 2 callbacks are scheduled by executor threads and the impact on robotics application performance. It discusses how underlying middleware like DDS or Zenoh can affect timing in publish-subscribe message-driven applications.

Time Table

Commetees

Scientific Committee

• Giorgio Buttazzo
• Nicola Mazzocca
• Lucia Lo Bello
• Enrico Fraccaroli
• Tullio Vardenga
• Andrea Bondavalli
• Paolo Brugio

Organizing Committee

• Alessandro Capotondi
• Franca Rocco di Torrepadula

References for logistics

• Alessandro Capotondi
• Federico Gavioli
• Francesco Moretti

How to Sign Up

If you would like to attend, please write to me at enrico.fraccaroli@univr.it with the following information:

• Name
• Last Name
• Organization or University and Department
• Email
• Phone number

Registration fee: €350

Join us this September in Modena to gain skills in embedded systems and cyber-physical technologies!

Attachments:

Biografie Summer School IWES