PhD Forum Program


Monday, Jun 22, 2026

Title: Effective Research Presentations: Principles and Practice

Speaker: Simone Silvestri

 

10:30 – 11:00 Student presentations 

Towards a Lightweight Foundation Model for Smart-Home Sensor Data

Michele Fiori (University of Milan, Italy)

 

Learning Adaptive Adversarial Attacks for Medical AI via Reinforcement Learning

Manuel Fabiano (University of Messina, Italy)

 

 
Zero-Shot Cross Domain Forecasting of Load and Thermal Dynamics in Residential Setting
Jainam J. Dhruva (University of Kentucky, USA)
 
From Incremental Learning to Federated Distillation, Continual and Privacy-Preserving Intelligence at the Edge
Ilenia Ficili (Università Degli Studi di Messina, Italy)
 
Trust and Trustworthiness-Aware Congestion Reduction of Drivers of Ground Vehicles with Dynamic, Heterogeneous Autonomy
Doris E M Brown (Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA)
 
Toward FPGA Virtualization on the Compute Continuum
Vincenzo Alessio Bucaria (University of Messina, Italy)
 
Deployable Microtransit Routing. Embedding Operational Constraints in the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows
Agrima Khanna (Vanderbilt University, USA)
 
Talk to Your Agent: LLM-Based Trajectory Grounding and Behavioral Correction in RL
Gaetano Pio Pispisa (University of Messina, Italy)
 
BioDevOps: Toward a Formal Framework for Continuous Deployment in Safety-Critical Medical Devices
Fabio Orazio Mirto (University of Messina, Italy)
 
 

Tuesday, Jun 23, 2026

15:30 – 16:00 1-minute madness

16:00 – 18:00 Poster presentations

 

Instructions for attendees

PhD Forum participants will need to prepare:

  • An A0-sized poster
  • A single slide for the 1-minute madness
  • A slide to present their poster during the PhD Forum

Please send the 1-minute madness slide to the organizers by June 15th.

A printed version of the poster should be brought to the conference. 

Monday’s student presentations are 10 minutes + 5 minutes for Q&A. The presentation should be at most 3 slides, and represent the content of the poster.

 

Accepted Contributions

▸  Towards a Lightweight Foundation Model for Smart-Home Sensor Data

Michele Fiori (University of Milan, Italy)

▸  Learning Adaptive Adversarial Attacks for Medical AI via Reinforcement Learning

Manuel Fabiano (University of Messina, Italy)

▸  Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Forecasting of Load and Thermal Dynamics in Residential Setting

Jainam J. Dhruva (University of Kentucky, USA)

▸  From Incremental Learning to Federated Distillation: Continual and Privacy-Preserving Intelligence at the Edge

Ilenia Ficili (University of Messina, Italy)

▸  Trust and Trustworthiness-Aware Congestion Reduction of Drivers of Ground Vehicles with Dynamic, Heterogeneous Autonomy

Doris E M Brown (Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA)

▸  Toward FPGA Virtualization on the Compute Continuum

Vincenzo Alessio Bucaria (University of Messina, Italy)

▸  Deployable Microtransit Routing: Embedding Operational Constraints in the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows

Agrima Khanna (Vanderbilt University, USA)

▸  Talk to Your Agent: LLM-Based Trajectory Grounding and Behavioral Correction in RL

Gaetano Pio Pispisa (University of Messina, Italy)

▸  BioDevOps: Toward a Formal Framework for Continuous Deployment in Safety-Critical Medical Devices

Fabio Orazio Mirto (University of Messina, Italy)