Rising Stars Forum

Abstract: For those who pursue a professional career in research, the period after obtaining a PhD is unique: you are no longer a student, but you are not yet an experienced researcher. These are exciting times: you are finally in the place to shape your own professional future. At the same time, the well-defined goal of completing your thesis is replaced by several aspirations whose path to fulfillment is significantly less clear and, as your career progresses, involves many decisions, demands, and responsibilities for which a PhD does not necessarily prepare you.

In this talk, I reflect on my own experience to distill some of the crucial decisions I made, sometimes without even realizing, and key lessons I learned. Of course, there is no magic recipe here, as we are all different. Still, I hope you will find it useful, and possibly even reassuring, to peek at some of the challenges and options that may be lying ahead, helping to make choices that will contribute to define what kind of researcher you will eventually become.

Bio: Gian Pietro Picco is a professor in the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) at the University of Trento, Italy, for which he has also served as Department Chair. His research has spanned software engineering, middleware, and distributed systems, and is currently focused on low-power wireless networking and localization for the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems.  The research performed in his group emphasizes the validation of novel approaches and protocols via system prototypes and their evaluation in real-world testbeds and applications. He is the recipient of several awards, including a "Most Influential Paper" at ICSE'07 for a paper published a decade earlier, and Best Paper Awards at IPSN (2009, 2011, 2015, 2023), PerCom (2012), EWSN (2018), and IPIN (2019). He has served as General Chair and Program Chair for several flagship conferences (e.g., SenSys, CPS-IoT Week, SECON, EWSN, IoTDI, DCOSS, Middleware). He is an associate editor for ACM Trans. on Sensor Networks (TOSN) and has served in the same role for IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering (TSE) and the J. of Pervasive and Mobile Computing. He was also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Trans. on the Internet of Things (TIOT).