SMARTNET alumni success stories

  • 2nd intake – 2019-2021

Pablo Castro received his BSc degree in Electronics Engineering from the National University of Asuncion, Paraguay in 2018. During and after his bachelor Pablo obtained working experience as an IT consultant. He also received an Erasmus Mundus MSc degree in the Smartnet Telecom and Sensing Networks (SMARTNET) from Télécom SudParis, France and Aston University, Birmingham, UK. His MSc Thesis “Modulation Format Recognition Using Machine Learning“ was supervised by Dr Stylianos Sygletos. As the next step, Pablo accepted an offer of the Engineer Advanced Technology in Adva Optical Networking, Germany. To be specific, he is doing an industrial PhD as part of the PICaboo project. Hasan Salman received his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Information Engineering from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, in 2019. After completing his BSc Hasan joined the second cohort of the SMARTNET programme (2019-2021). He received an Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters degree in the Smartnet Telecom and Sensing Networks (SMARTNET), completing his first year at Télécom SudParis, France and his second year at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. During the MSc thesis, Hasan did an industrial internship under the supervision of Professor Wladek Forysiak at II-VI Incorporated, Paignton, UK. The topic was “14xx pump laser design and performance analysis in Raman Amplifiers”. Hasan graduated in September 2021 and started the position of System Engineer at Xtera, London area in November 2021 as an innovative provider of subsea systems and telecoms technology. His responsibilities are to carry out modelling of field transmission experiments, generate System Configuration Specification, support transmission lab resources, and participate in peer reviews of development.

Regina Ochonu graduated with a BSc degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 2014. After graduation, she worked 4 years (2015 – 2019) with Nokia Networks in Nigeria as a Network Operations Engineer/Analyst. To further her academics, she joined the SMARTNET Programme in 2019, where did the 1st year at UoA, Greece and the 2nd year at TSP/TPT, France. Regina’s MSc thesis on “Ground Network Design for Optical GEO-Satellite Communications” was carried out during her 6-months research internship at Nokia Bell Labs, Paris-Saclay, France. After her graduation from the SMARTNET programme in September 2021, Regina joined the Universitat Politècnica De Catalunya (Barcelona Tech) – UPC – for a researcher/PhD position in Spain. The position is part of the Marie Curie 5GSMARTFACT project, whose objective is to study, develop, optimize, and assess the deployment of 5G/6G networks targeting IIoT requirements in factory environments, and exploit them for industry 4.0 applications. Regina’s research topic is “Slicing for 5G dense radio networks in smart factories”. She will be carrying out a part of research in Nokia Bell Labs, Aalborg, Denmark and Siradel, Rennes, France.

Dan Serbanoiu received his BSc degree in Computer Science from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2017. After finishing his internship and graduating, Dan had a position in the FuturaSI company in Italy, where he developed the web version of Unico3 software. Dan also received an Erasmus Mundus MSc degree in the Smartnet Telecom and Sensing Networks (SMARTNET) from UoA, Athens and Aston University, UK. His Master’s thesis was titled “Use of Kernel Hilbert Spaces for online data analysis in market research systems”. Currently, Dan is employed as an analyst in the risk team at Goldman Sachs in Birmingham, UK. He works on a suite of products that are responsible for calculating the margin on a set of positions and mitigating the risk involved in a trade. Khojiakbar Botirov obtained his BSc degree in Telecommunications technologies from Tashkent University of Information Technologies, Uzbekistan, in 2019. He also received an Erasmus Mundus MSc degree in the Smartnet Telecom and Sensing Networks (SMARTNET) Télécom SudParis, France and the University of Athens, Greece. Now Khojiakbar is a PhD student in the Greenedge Marie-Curie PhD program, and his main topic will be designing energy-autonomous LIoT nodes and a network of LIoT nodes with the usage of printed electronics to have a more sustainable solution. The implementation of AI/ML is also expected to be done within this project.  The above-mentioned project is directly related to Khojiakbar’s MSc thesis, which was “AI/ML assisted LiFi communication systems for future 6G communication systems”. Khojiakbar is grateful to everyone, who was involved in coordination, and teaching in the SMARTNET project. Due to the completion of this programme, Khojiakbar has an opportunity to bring up solutions for a better and greener future. Sasipim Srivallapanondh received her BSc degree in Engineering from Kasetsart University, Bangkok, Thailand. Sasipim was awarded the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree Programme scholarship under the Smart Telecom and Sensing Networks (SMARTNET) programme. She spent her first year at Aston University (2019-2020), and her second year at the University of Athens (2020-2021).  In her Masters dissertation, co-supervised by the company Ubitech (Greece), she worked on edge devices considering GPU processing for AI applications, especially object detection using deep neural networks. In this work, she focused on NVIDIA’s Jetson devices. Currently, Sasipim is a new Early Stage Researcher in the project MENTOR, who will be working on the topic of “Complexity reduction and data augmentation for deep machine learning-based optical transmission systems”. Mahmoud Esawi received his BSc degree in Science in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from the University of Khartoum, Sudan. After graduation, Mahmoud worked as a Research and Development Engineer at the University of Khartoum, Space Research Center and a Radio Network Optimization Engineer in Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd Sudan, both positions are in Khartoum, Sudan. Mahmoud completed his SMARTNET degree in September 2021 with the first year at the Telecom SudParis, France, and the second year at the University of Athens, Greece. Since October 2021 he has been employed by Accelleran in Antwerp, Belgium, as a “5G Open RAN Integration and Validation Engineer”.Katrina Nieva is a Filipina from humble beginnings but with bold dreams. As someone who is passionate about science and technology, she pursued an undergraduate degree in electronics engineering and graduated with honours at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She is also a firm believer of lifelong learning. This led her to pursue further education in Europe and join SMARTNET. She graduated with merit from Télécom SudParis (France) and Aston University (UK) – culminating the programme with a thesis about machine learning applied to fibre optics. Katrina believes that specialising in telecommunications would enable her to achieve a life of purpose – bridging people across countries through innovation. She is now working as a CCNA-certified Network Design Engineer at British Telecommunications (BT), focusing on software-defined networks (SDN) and automation.

 

  • 1st intake – 2018-2020

Sarah Masaad embarked on an international journey from a very early age as a Jordanian who spent her childhood in 5 different countries. In 2018, she graduated from the University of Bahrain with a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering. Sarah then joined SMARTNET’s first cohort, completing her first year at Aston University in the UK and her second year at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. She graduated in September 2020 and joined imec/Gent University for a researcher/PhD position in Belgium. The position is part of the Marie Curie POSTDIGITAL project, in which a network of European institutions researches various topics in neuromorphic computing. Sarah’s research topic is photonic reservoir computing for telecommunication applications.

Hang Ha had her Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering at Bucknell University, United States. She completed her SMARTNET Degree in September 2020 with the first year at Telecom SudParis, France, and the second year at Aston University, UK (Mobility 3). Hang Ha’s current working place is at FPT Software, Vietnam, and her position is Embedded IoT Engineer. She is working with an FPT’s customer, which is a renowned company famous for its IoT products, to develop Zigbee solutions using their product line. 

Yevhenii Osadchuk joined the SMARTNET programme at the University of Athens and Aston University after doing his BSc and MSc degree at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Ukraine and completing the Erasmus+ mobility programme (MSc) at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Kosice, Slovakia. While working on his thesis at Aston, Yevhenii started searching for PhD positions at universities worldwide, as one of the possible career steps after the SMARTNET is a PhD scientific role. Going through lots of interviews and presentations he got a couple of offers from well-known universities in Europe. Finally, Yevhenii accepted the offer for an Early Stage Researcher position from the University of Athens under the SEMANTIC ITN framework, funded by the Marie Curie Foundation. The program’s focus is on establishing a robust and fast 5G connectivity in Europe and Yevhenii is truly happy to be involved in such a great project.

Salma Escobar obtained her BSc degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Mexico in 2017. She also received Erasmus Mundus MSc degree in the Smartnet Telecom and Sensing Networks (SMARTNET) from Aston University, Birmingham and Télécom SudParis, France. Her MSc thesis was written in collaboration with the Huawei industrial company. As the next step, Salma accepted the offer to stay in France and continue her industry-oriented PhD in Huawei and Télécom SudParis. Salma’s research topic is an extension of her internship project in “Capacity modelling and maximization in ultra-wide band WDM systems”.

 Daryna Kravchenko received her BSc degree in Physics from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine in 2017. She also received an Erasmus Mundus MSc degree in the Smartnet Telecom and Sensing Networks (SMARTNET) from Aston University, Birmingham and Télécom SudParis, France. During her MSc Thesis Daryna did an internship with the ASN (Alcatel Submarine Networks) company. Daryna has started the position of Optical Engineer in the ASN (Alcatel Submarine Networks) in October 2020, at the same company where she has made her internship but in another team. Her responsibilities are to design and setup optical transmission systems without repeaters and to demonstrate the performance to the customers.

Nelson Castro received his BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Autonomous University of Honduras in 2016. After his bachelor, Nelson obtained working experience as a SCADA Operator and Remote Control Systems Engineer in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He was awarded an Erasmus Mundus scholarship to study for a Joint MSc degree in the Smartnet Telecom and Sensing Networks (SMARTNET) program, which he carried out in Télécom SudParis, France and Aston University, United Kingdom. During his MSc thesis, Nelson worked on a research project under the supervision of Dr Stylianos Sygletos, studying the compensation of nonlinearity impairments in fibre optic transmission systems using recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Having successfully completed his MSc studies, Nelson is now a PhD student at Aston University, where he continues to work on the application of Machine Learning techniques to nonlinear fibre optics.

Peter Nwakamma obtained his BSc degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Nigeria with the First-Class Honours in 2014. After his bachelor, Peter had working experience as a Graduate Assistant in the Department of Electronic Engineering at the same university. He also received an Erasmus Mundus Joint MSc degree in the Smartnet Telecom and Sensing Networks (SMARTNET) from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece and IP Paris (Télécom SudParis), France. His MSc thesis on Distributed Acoustic Sensing of Optical Fibers using Coherent Detection of Rayleigh back-scattering was done during his research internship at Nokia Bell Labs, France. In line with his career goals, Peter then decided to pursue a PhD and was accepted in a CIFRE PhD in collaboration with Mitsubishi Electric R&D Center Europe and Télécom Paris (IP Paris), France to work on the topic “Optimal Hardware Architectures for the Processing of Optical Signals in Access and Aggregation Networks.” He has also participated as a student volunteer on the organizing committee of conferences such as ECOC 2021 (Europe’s largest conference on optical communications) and JWOC 2021 (Junior Conference on Wireless & Optical Communications).

Musharrat Shabnam received her Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Electronic and Communication Engineering from the Military Institute of Science and Technology in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She was awarded an Erasmus Mundus scholarship to study for a Joint MSc degree in the Smartnet Telecom and Sensing Networks (SMARTNET) program, which she carried out at Aston University, United Kingdom and Télécom SudParis, France. Having successfully completed her Masters, Musharrat has started her PhD studies as an ORC Doctoral Fellow in the Optics and Photonics PhD program at CREOL (college of research in optics and laser) at the University of Central Florida, USA. She received a doctoral fellowship and has joined a research group. She will be working in the cleanroom to fabricate and characterize monolithic high power lasers and perform phase locking for various usage.

Haya Al Kassir received a BSc degree in Communications and Electronics Engineering from Syria’s Tishreen University. In 2020, she received an Erasmus Mundus Joint MSc in Smartnet Telecom and Sensing Networks (SMARTNET) from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and IP Paris (Télécom SudParis), France. Her Master’s thesis was titled “Link Adaptation for Energy Savings in Optical Fiber Networks”. She was appointed an Early Stage Researcher position at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2021, which was funded by the Marie Curie Foundation. The title of the project is “Antenna array digital beamforming (BF) using AI.”

 

 

 

Ikhtiyor Nematov obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering (Information Security) from Tashkent University of Information Technologies, Uzbekistan. He completed his SMARTNET Degree in 2020 with the first year at the University of Athens, Greece, and the second year in Télécom SudParis, France. Ikhtiyor did his MSc internship at Nokia Bell Labs France on “Interoperability of IoT”. Currently, Ikhtiyor is doing a PhD in the DEDS (Data Science Data Engineering) program which operates under the Horizon 2020 – Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2020) framework. The research will be conducted in 2 universities, 2 years at University Libre Bruxelles Belgium, and 1 year at Aalborg University Denmark.

 

 

Ghazal Meshkati received her Bachelor of Information Technology Engineering (IT) from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, Iran. She completed her SMARTNET Degree in 2020 with the first year at the University of Athens, Greece, and the second year in Télécom SudParis, France. In March 2021, Ghazal started to work at SII (consultant company) for Orange (telecom operator) as a core network engineer, in a team dealing with the mobile core network data. She has a permanent contract (CDI in France) with SII. Diana Zhussip received her B.E. Degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan in 2018. She completed her SMARTNET Degree in 2020 with the first year at Télécom SudParis, France, and the second year at University of Athens, Greece. In October 2021, she joined Nokia, Finland as 5G System Specification Engineer. She works in MN RAN business unit, and her responsibilities include feasibility study, technical analysis and system level specification of new features for Nokia’s 5G RAN products.