Prof.dr. Paul J.M. Havinga is full professor and chair of the Pervasive Systems research group at the Computer Science department at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He received his PhD at the University of Twente on the thesis entitled “Mobile Multimedia Systems” in 2000, and was awarded with the ‘DOW Dissertation Energy Award’ for this work. He has a broad background in various aspects of communication systems: on wireless communication, on chip-area network architectures for handheld devices, on ATM network switching, mobile multimedia systems, QoS over wireless networks, reconfigurable computing, and on interconnection architectures for multiprocessor systems.
His research themes have focused on wireless sensor networks, large-scale distributed systems, and energy-efficient wireless communication.
The common theme in these areas is on the development of large-scale, heterogeneous, wireless, distributed systems. Research questions cover architectures, protocols, programming paradigms, algorithms, and applications. This research has resulted in many scientific publications in journals and conferences. He is programme leader of the Graduate Research programme ‘Wireless and Sensor Systems’ at the University of Twente, and scientific leader of the ICT Innovation Platform Sensor Networks.
He is editor of several journals and magazines. He is involved as program committee chair, member, and reviewer for many conferences and workshops. He regularly serves as independent expert for reviewing and evaluation of international research projects for the EU, the US, and international government. He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Pisa in 1998, and the Communications Research Laboratory in Yokosuka Japan in 2000. In 2005 he was a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne and the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
He has a significant experience as project manager in several international research projects on wireless sensor networks. In 2001 he initiated the first European project on wireless sensor networks EYES, and many national and international projects evolved from this. In 2004 he founded the company Ambient Systems B.V., partly based on the results of that project. In May 2007 he received the ICT Innovation Award for the successful transfer of knowledge from university to industrial use. In June 2007 he received the “van den Kroonenberg award” for being a successful innovative entrepreneur. In 2008 he co-founded the company Inertia Technology that develops activity recognition solutions with body area networks, based on completely wireless inertial sensing systems.