Giovanni Merlino is currently a research fellow at University of Messina (UniMe), under an EU H2020 BEACON project grant, and a long-standing member of the Mobile and Distributed Systems Lab (MDSLab) at UniMe. He holds an international PhD degree in Computer and Telecommunications Engineering from the Department of Engineering (DIEEI) at the University of Catania. Beyond research, his duties currently also include leadership of testbed management activities, as well as local node management for XI-FI (FIWARE Lab) on behalf of UniMe.
His research activity is currently focused on mobile and distributed systems, where research topics include Cloud paradigms, Internet of Things, Smart sensors, crowdsensing. His R&D contributions and achievements include co-leading the design of Stack4Things, an OpenStack-based Sensing-and-Actuation-as-a-Service framework, co-authoring over 40 papers published in international journals and conferences proceedings, participating in technical program committees of international conferences, as well as spearheading efforts for an official and crowdfunded research initiative (#SmartME) to deploy and operate an experimental Smart City testbed in Messina. He is also a teaching assistant at UniMe for the courses in “Computer Networks” and “Embedded Systems” (B.D. curriculum), for the course in “Distributed Systems” (M.D. curriculum), and there acknowledged as Fellow in Distributed Systems as well.
