Alessandro Morelli

Experience

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  Centro Computer S.p.A.

  Mar 2009 - May 2009

  Student Internship

  Full-stack developer (HTML, CSS, Javascript, ASP, Microsoft Silverlight), Windows Mobile PDA application developer, C# developer

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  Università degli Studi di Ferrara

  Sept 2010 - Mar 2011

  Tutor for the class "Fondamenti di Informatica - Modulo A"

  As a tutor, my duties consisted in preparing exercises concerning the topics covered by the professor in class. At the beginning of each lesson, I held a brief presentation to overview the assignments and go over the parts of the professor's lesson that were the most relevant to the given exercises.I was always available to answer to students' questions, in the lab during class or anytime via e-mail.

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  IHMC

  Jun 2011 - Jan 2012

  Research Intern

  I was the main developer of NetProxy, a network proxy application written in C++ that transparently changes the network transport protocol used to send data over the network, applies compression, performs flow prioritization, intelligent packet buffering, and message consolidation, and logs network activity.NetProxy can remap TCP/UDP/ICMP connections and traffic flows to Mockets (a communication middleware that provides transport protocol capabilities specifically designed for wireless mobile networks), TCP, or UDP, in a completely transparent fashion with respect to the applications sending data.In order to capture application traffic transparently and perform protocol remapping and other traffic manipulations, NetProxy uses a virtual TUN/TAP network interface, similarly to a VPN client.As part of this internship and in order to test NetProxy, I developed a multi-threaded network application using Java that could reproduce many different traffic conditions and network loads. Show less

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  IHMC

  May 2012 - Nov 2012

  Research Scholar

  During this experience as a researcher at IHMC, I worked on extending NetProxy capabilities by implementing gateway mode. Gateway mode can only be used on network nodes equipped with two or more network interfaces. It leverages the libpcap library to intercept network packets on one interface, extract and process the payload, and finally transmit the extracted data to a remote NetProxy instance using the configured protocol (this operation is called protocol remapping, or translation) via one of the other network interfaces. The second NetProxy will perform the inverse protocol translation and deliver the data to the destination using the original protocol. In order to implement gateway mode in NetProxy, I had to implement the ARP protocol, so that NetProxy can correctly reply to ARP requests from nodes.Another feature I implemented during this period is UDP message consolidation. This allows NetProxy to send multiple UDP messages within a single NetProxy message, which effectively saves bandwidth by avoiding re-transmitting the IP and UDP headers with each single UDP message. To support this capability, I had to implement the logic to reconstruct the IP and UDP headers and fragment UDP messages at the IP level, to support UDP messages larger than the MTU. Show less

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  University of Ferrara

  Jan 2013 - Dec 2015

  PHD Student

  My research activity during my PhD focused on communications middleware for next-generation networks, e.g., Smart Cities, and other extremely challenging networking scenarios, such as tactical edge and mobile ad hoc networks. More specifically, I continued the work on the Agile Computing Middleware (ACM) I started at IHMC. The ACM is a network- and context-aware communications middleware specifically designed to support applications that run in extremely dynamic, unreliable, and low-bandwidth, varying-latency networks.Next-generation mobile applications will work in scenarios with similar characteristics. Modern Internet-connected devices, such as smartphones and tablets, are equipped with multiple network interfaces (5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ...). Each technology has very different bandwidth capacity, latency, and channel error rates; mobility will frequently cause connectivity to drop and horizontal and vertical handover to occur.Some of the solutions that I investigated during my studies include the concept of semi-porous semantic communications channels, which promote resource sharing and in-network cache efficiency in collaborative, push-based Information-centric networks, and prediction of future contacts with nodes already encountered in the past via contact pattern extrapolation, which can be exploited to support mobile data offloading. Show less

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  Department of Engineering, University of Ferrara

  Jan 2016 - Mar 2017

  Postdoctoral Researcher

  As a post-doc researcher, I continued writing and publishing scientific papers and progressed my research work on communications middleware for next-generation networking scenarios, fog and edge computing, and the Internet of Things. Other duties included teaching class, tutoring students, and advising graduate and undergraduate Thesis.

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  Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition

  Apr 2017 - now

  Research Associate

  I lead and co-lead a number of applied research projects designed to provide effective services and functionalities to applications running in disadvantaged networks such as DIL (delayed, intermittent, low-bandwidth) and MANET (Mobile Ad hoc Networks). As a project leader, I manage and oversee all decisions regarding the software design and its architecture, dependencies, and external interfaces. I am also the lead developer for a number of such projects.As a PI/co-Pi and research associate, I am responsible for managing research funds and allocating the work time of developers and scientists across multiple projects. My duties also include writing white papers and research proposals to secure research funds.Projects I am involved with: DSPro (PL*, LD**), DisService (PL), NetProxy (PL, LD), Mockets, SENSEI, Federation Services.*PL - Project Leader;**LD - Lead Developer. Show less