🙋‍♂️Curriculum Vitae

Here you can find some useful information about me.

Me at a glance

Giovanni Grieco is a PhD candidate at the Polytechnic University of Bari (Politecnico di Bari) in Italy. Prof. Luigi Alfredo Grieco supervises his work in the Internet of Drones as he pursues the XXXVII cycle of the PhD Degree in Electrical and Information Engineering.

With a strong background in Computer Science and Telecommunication Engineering, he constantly experiments with cutting edge technology. Indeed, he maintains a portfolio of several open source projects and teaching activities (Open the sidebar! 👈🏻) in order to share his knowledge and inspire others to tackle difficult problems in telecommunications and beyond.

He previously worked as a Technical Assistant at Telematics Lab and the National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT) for two years, focusing on strategic activities such as cutting edge cybersecurity for hybrid-cloud architectures and Software Defined Networking (SDN) for backbone networks.

His professional career began in the private sector, where he worked as a Software Engineer for ESIM in Bari on the research and development of new products in Railway Diagnostics. During these years he met extraordinary people from CNR and Exprivia.

During his studies, he worked on several projects in Automotive Engineering at Poliba Corse Association and other private groups to develop prototypes for emerging use-cases, utilising technologies such as compilers, drones, air traffic control platforms, and drone remote signalling.

🔧 Work Experience

Please keep in mind that some of the information presented here may be intentionally out of date or misses key information.

If you are a recruiter, please contact me with your business email address to receive the most recent CV in GDPR-compliant Europass format.

🧑🏻‍💻 Principal Maintainer of IoD_Sim

IoD_Sim is a free and open source system-level network simulator that addresses the various aspects of Internet of Drones and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle communications. It is a research and development platform for innovative architectures and prototypes for next-generation non-terrestrial communication infrastructure. To maintain an accurate simulation modelling, it relies on the well-established and mature Network Simulator 3 (ns-3). IoD_Sim is hosted on GitHub and described by different Publications. Researchers interested in experimenting with the Internet of Drones are welcome to adopt it and collaborate!

🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏻 Google Summer of Code Contributor @ ns-3/NR

I have been selected to contribute to Network Simulator 3 (ns-3), especially its New Radio (NR) module, as part of the Google Summer of Code! My goal is to improve the usability of the NR module by the end of summer 2023 for easier research and development on 5G networks. The project is registered on the GSoC Official Website, while all the progress are being tracked over ns-3 Official Wiki.

PolibaX is an informal group of students and professors of the Polytechnic University of Bari, working together to build drones. We are currently preparing for the Drone Contest, a national competition between major universities hosted by Leonardo to build autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in GPS-denied environments. I am building solid multi-disciplinary and soft skills in several disciplines (i.e., high-performance Wi-Fi, Robot Operating System (ROS) internals, Linux Kernel engineering, firmware development), working around the clock for such challenge!

🧑🏻‍🏫 Contract Teacher

Roboting course for High-School

Awarded a 30 hours course sponsored by the National Operational Programme (Programma Operativo Nazionale - PON). Teached the basics of robotics and computer vision systems to high-school students, both specialized in a specific discipline (mainly mechanical and computer science) or from the broader scientific lyceum. This course involved the programming of a robotic arm from DENSO Wave using WINCAPS III and the programming of a pattern recognition system using OpenCV on Python. The students played at Tic-Tac-Toe against the robot.

Student Orientation course in Telecommunications Engineering

Awarded a 8 hours Italy's Recovery and Resilience Plan (Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza - PNRR) course. Teached broadly how mobile communications work by studying, through empirical examination, how an engineer can analyze drone control communications, tamper with their encryption mechanisms, and reverse the protocol stack.

C++ Standard-compliant Programming

Private teaching to professionals working with C++ programming language, which had to upgrade their codebase to adhere to C++11 standard rules.

LPI Linux Essentials

An introductory course in Linux distribution that covers the basics of the operating system and its command-line interface and adheres to the guidelines of the LPI Linux Essentials certification. This course was made possible by a fruitful collaboration between the Italian Linux Society and BlueLightHouse. The entire course is available on-demand on ILS PeerTube and YouTube.

🧪 Technical Assistant @ Telematics Lab, Politecnico di Bari

Winner of a scholarship sponsored by Politecnico di Bari. Activities focused on the research and development of network architectures for the Internet of Drones, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Information-Centric Networking (ICN).

Over time, the following practical skills were developed:

  • Design and implementation of a middleware to interconnect IP and ICN (NDN) networks in Kotlin and Java.

  • Design and development of a web application to geolocate and query LoRa sensors using Angular, Mapbox, and MQTT over WebSocket.

  • Implementation of an Openstack-based provisioning system using Bash and Red Hat Ansible, with the support of nested virtualization on CentOS-based systems and Intel VT-x.

In addition, the following seminars/laboratories were planned:

  • Simulators for wireless communication systems.

  • Application rapid prototyping that uses Azure edge and cloud infrastructures to retrieve data from IoT sensors.

🧪 Technical Assistant @ CNIT

Activities focused on the research and development of an innovative cybersecurity platform for digital service chains funded by H2020 GUARD. It is also possible to learn more through Publications.

The activity centred on the design and implementation of a novel Authentication and Authorization service. The most relevant work concerned the extension of Apache Kafka's security features to support:

  • An Authentication and Authorization system based on JSON Web Tokens and the OAuth2 protocol via an external Identity Access Management subsystem.

  • Authorization module that uses Access Control Lists and timers to validate connecting clients and their permissions, thus defending the platform's core from authentication, authorization, non-repudiation and replay attacks.

🚆 Software Engineer and Intern @ ESIM Srl

At the Railway Diagnostics and Engineering department the worked consisted on a variety of activities in engineering.

Software Engineering activities include:

  • The creation of proprietary software for big data processing written in Java EE and Kotlin.

  • The development of embedded software in ISO/IEC 14882:2011 (C++11) and Kotlin/Native.

  • The implementation of data acquisition software for specialized railway edge network.

Activities in Systems Engineering:

  • Periodic hardware and firmware maintenance of servers.

  • Management of a VLAN-based multi-tenant network with firewall and security policies.

  • Design, installation, and administration of an OpenStack infrastructure based on the KVM and ESXi hypervisors, as well as block storage services.

  • Configuration and upkeep of private services such as Apache Maven and GitLab, big data services such as Solr and Postgres clusters, OCI-compatible registries and container images, Tomcat and ZooKeeper services with high availability, CentOS and Windows Server bare-metal systems, DevOps pipelines, and connectivity services on LTE/VPN for embedded systems.

🎓 Education

PhD Student in Electrical and Information Engineering @ Politecnico di Bari

Research in novel protocols and architectures at PHY and MAC layers for the Internet of Drones. Learn more about activities and results in Publications.

Master of Engineering in Telecommunications @ Politecnico di Bari

The following group projects have been integrated with study activity:

  • Design and implementation of a mission planner and drone remote piloting system.

  • Design and implementation of a transpiler and visual programming editor to design high-level simulation scenarios for IoD_Sim.

  • Design and implementation of a flight controller and firmware for a quadcopter drone.

Study activity has also been combined with a survey on security and privacy in the Internet of Drones.

Finalist at the CINI Cybsersecurity National Lab's Cyberchallenge.

The following practical abilities were acquired:

  • UML-based Software Engineering and automatic documentation generation with Doxygen and Sphinx.

  • Agile-based team work with Continuous Integration and Test-Driven Development.

  • Creation of graphical 3D applications in C# using Unity and the Mapbox SDK.

  • Development of front-end applications using TypeScript and Angular.

  • Development of critical, real-time applications for flight controllers in Python and C.

  • LLVM/Clang software development based for parsing and semantic analysis of C++ code.

  • VPNs design and management of with OpenVPN and Wireguard.

  • Microsoft Azure services were used to develop Cloud-native applications.

  • Handling of multimedia streams encoded in MPEG-4 and H.264.

  • Secure programming and vulnerability scanning through OpenVAS and similar.

  • TLS certificate management and mutual authentication.

  • Rapid prototyping in 3D printing and PLA.

Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science and Automation @ Politecnico di Bari

An extracurricular internship at Poliba Corse was combined with study activities. The goal of this activity was to design and implement an embedded system for a Formula SAE car.

This system was built on Linux Embedded and Buildroot, with applications written in C++/Qt and Python. The entire system was built around a single-board computer equipped with and ADC and a CAN transceiver.

The entire project is open source and can be found on GitHub.

Licenses and Certifications

  • Drone Remote Pilot License in OPEN category, A1 and A3

  • CompTIA Linux+

  • Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals

  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals

  • LPI Linux Essentials

  • Microsoft Office Specialist - Excel Expert

  • Italian Driving License (Type B)

Volunteering Activities

PreviousHello there!NextPublications

Last updated