Best moments of 2020

 Best moments of 2020

Last year was truly unconventional. It all started with my wife and me moving to Stuttgart/Germany to start my external research activities at Nokia Bell Labs and she continuing her architecture master's degree activities at Stuttgart University.  Leaving the fantastic Copenhagen and all the people I was lucky to know on DTU was hard, but I was also excited to start this new chapter. After a few nights without good sleeping and a lot of luggage, we start settling in Stuttgart and - it is an incredible city!

The FONTE project (name of my Ph.D. project) has several activities planned for the students and in 2020 started with 2 of them. The Nonlinear Fourier Transform Workshop (NFT) and the second transferable skills workshop at Aston University (TSW2). Both well-prepared events and you can check the list of speakers in the links I shared. I especially enjoy the set of new skills I learned in the TSW2! Here I take a moment to thanks Christiane, my project manager, for being able to organize such events.

Shortly after that, because of the COVID-19 situation, all on presence activities were canceled. This forced the community to adapt to this new way of social interaction. Most of the activities started to be online, especially conferences. On the bright side, because of this new organization, they also started to be free to join. Therefore, I was able to watch several different conferences, which I would not be able to do otherwise. This also required a new way to watch and participate in these activities that, I must confess, I am still perfecting. 

In July, as I mentioned in one of my last blogs, I was able to learn a new set of skills with Nokia Bell Labs for 5G. This was a really amazing opportunity, mostly because I am concentrating on optical communications for the last 10 years, and understanding the 5G and the upcoming challenges in this detailed course given by Nokia Bell Labs broadened my view.

I think all these training events, together with the excellent guidance of my advisor Darko Zibar and co-advisors Francesco Da Ros, Henning  Bülow, and Vahid Aref paid off. In 2020, I was able to also have a great research output with 3 journals (Applied Science, Journal on Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, and Journal of Lightwave Technology (JLT)) and 2 conference papers (22nd International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks and  46th European Conference on Optical Communication). You can check in this link: 2020 publications. The JLT publication was a farewell good news from 2020 as I received the acceptance on 31/12/2020 - I still need to tell my project manager - sorry Christiane!

Despite all the above-mentioned events, other training sessions were prepared within the framework of FONTE, and which I was glad to attend, such as the Machine Learning Symposium (link), Bayesian Filtering Symposium (link), and a few others. I won't even start to tell on my adventure in trying to learn the German language. Hoffentlich werden wir ein schönes Jahr haben! 😁

I am leaving it open so we can talk about it personally at some conference in the future!