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