Emil Jatib Khatib

Biography

I became an engineer in 2010, after finishing my Master in Electrical Engineering with majors in Telecommunications. My Master’s thesis was a result of the research that I performed during a 6-month stay in the German Aerospace Center in Munich. My work studied the performance of IEEE802.11p for Vehicular Networks, and also resulted in my first oral presentation in a conference.

In 2011, I started a position as a Research Assistant in UMA, in the Department of Systems Engineering and Automatics (ISA) and the Mapir Research Group (http://mapir.isa.uma.es/), where I worked in AI systems and robotics. During the 1-year duration of this position, I acquired skills in the area of autonomous robotics, remote control interfaces, demonstrator development, sensors, etc.

In 2012, I was offered the opportunity to start my PhD in the Mobilenet group (http://mobilenet.uma.es/), on a research project in collaboration with Ericsson Spain. I contributed to this project by developing Expert Systems (ES) and ML systems for Knowledge Acquisition (KA) in the field of Self-Healing in LTE networks. To do this study, I did two short stays in the USA, where I interviewed network engineers. In parallel, I obtained a second Master which taught me the latest progress in research in diverse areas in Telecommunications, such as optic communications, video processing, human-machine interfaces, etc. My Master Thesis studied the application of Genetic Algorithms for Self-healing systems in LTE networks.

In 2016, I did a 3 month stay in Nokia-Bell Labs Denmark, in Aalborg. During this stay, I developed several modules for the NS-3 simulator: an URLLC application, a ML scheme to use Dual Connectivity, improvements over existing LTE modules adding mechanisms to study the impact of mMTC, and an energy model for LTE. The research of this period resulted in an oral presentation in the 2018 IEEE BMSB.

I defended my PhD thesis in April 2017. The research work of the Thesis also produced one oral presentation in the in Globecom 2014 international conference in Austin (Texas), three national URSI oral presentations, 12 JCR journal publications and one patent.

In 2017 I started working as a postdoc in UMA. Although this was a short period of time, I worked on three different lines: a project with BWTech Brazil (https://www.bwtech.com/) on Self-healing in LTE networks; the development of a guidance application for persons with reduced mobility in a Smart-City project in collaboration with Indra (https://www.indracompany.com/); and the evelopment of a prototype interface to connect the experimental LTE network of Mobilenet to ML/ES systems for automatic configuration, within the ONE5G H2020 project.

From September 2017 to September 2018, I did a postdoctoral stay in the University of Aalborg (AAU). My tasks during this 1-year period were to develop a demonstrator of 5G technologies for the ONE5G project, and to participate in measurement campaigns for the MADE (Manufacturing for Denmark) project (https://en.made.dk/) for Industry 4.0 communications. This period also resulted in a rich dissemination activity; the 5G demonstrator was shown in several important events, such as EuCNC 2018, where the demo received the Best Booth Award; and the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2019. The industrial communications measurements resulted in two oral presentations in the 2019 IEEE VTC-Spring conference, and in 2019 GIoTS.

In 2018, I returned to UMA, where I overtook development tasks in several projects: ML/ES on network troubleshooting, overview of the deployment of an IoT network in collaboration with Telefónica (with WiFi, SigFox, LoRA, LTE and ZigBee), the EDEL4.0 project to develop techniques for industrial communications in 5G combined with security schemes, the H2020 LOCUS project on the topic of mobile network location and its applications, and the study of the application of Big Data analytics for detecting and preventing suicidal behavior with the analysis of social network activity.

In 2019, I did a second stay in the University of Aalborg, where I developed a new demonstrator for 5G industrial technologies. In this case, the demonstrator implemented a ML-as-a-Service prototype for quality of service prediction in critical industrial communications.

When Covid hit in 2020, my research priorities and the objectives of Mobilenet shifted towards contributing to the effort against the pandemic. This added new lines to my work, on the topic of the application of mobile networks to the control of population flows, analyzing publicly available data and also collaborating with other companies that participated in this effort.

Currently, I am co-IP in three transfer projects with BotOn (https://theboton.io/), Vodafone (https://www.vodafone.es/) and ACR (https://acr.es/), and in parallel, I continue my research line in IIoT. I also work as a lecturer and mentor for students in UMA.