The computer science professor will use his fellowship to develop a “smart” community network.

Assistant professor of computer science Marco Levorato has been named a Hellman Fellow for the 2016-17 academic year. The prestigious fellowship recognizes early career faculty members who show tremendous promise in their field, and helps to support their scholarly endeavors with up to $50,000 in funding.

Levorato will use his fellowship to support his Internet of Things (IoT)-related project, “The Path Towards Smart Interconnected Communities.” He hopes to probe the growing network of everyday objects equipped with microcontrollers, transceivers for digital communication and other communicative tools to “exploit a huge amount and variety of sensed data to extract relevant information with the possibility to act in real time to optimize specific processes,” according to the project proposal.

The project will take a particular interest in IoT in an urban context, with the aim of testing out a “Smart City” concept, where citizens are empowered “with the ability to provide direct feedback on services, infrastructures, and neighborhoods, thus creating a virtuous cycle between technology, citizens, and the city as a whole.”

“My objective is to facilitate the inclusion of citizens as the central component of city administration and systems,” Levorato says. “The fellowship will be used to develop a new link between citizens, technology and citywide services.”

Levorato joined UCI in 2013. He received his doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of Padova, Italy, in 2009.
Warren and Chris Hellman founded the Hellman Fellows program in 1994 to help fund junior faculty research at universities. The Hellman Fellow Fund has supported more than 850 junior faculty members and now provides graduate awards to support doctoral research in addition to university faculty.

For more information on the 2016-17 Hellman Fellows, view the official UCI media release.