The people of STRATUS Lab. Each photograph opens a short profile.
Francesco Longo is Associate Professor at the Department of Engineering of the University of Messina, where he leads the STRATUS Lab. His work spans distributed systems, cloud and edge computing, and the security of industrial and automotive infrastructure, with more than 170 publications in the field. He is a founding partner of SmartMe.IO, an academic spin-off building IoT and resilience engineering platforms.
Giovanni Merlino
Associate ProfessorSoftware-defined IoT · IT/OT convergence · Decentralization
Gaetano Pio Pispisa
PhD StudentEmbodied AI · LLMs for Robotics · Reinforcement Learning · Autonomous Driving
Vincenzo Alessio Bucaria
PhD StudentFPGA & Reconfigurable Computing · Distributed Virtualization · RISC-V & Open Hardware · Cloud Continuum
Manuel Fabiano
PhD StudentReinforcement Learning · Machine Unlearning · Trustworthy Machine Learning · Decentralized Identity
Giovanni Lombardo
PhD StudentZero-Trust Architectures · Cyber-Physical Systems Security · Distributed Virtualization · Cloud Continuum
Domenico Sosta
PhD StudentReinforcement Learning · World Models · Embedded AI · Zero-Trust Architectures
Francesco Trungadi
Undergraduate ResearcherCyber-Physical Systems Security · Decentralized Identity · Post-Quantum Cryptography
Marco Candela
Undergraduate ResearcherCyber-Physical Systems Security · Zero-Trust Architectures · Trusted Execution EnvironmentsFormer Members
Giovanni Merlino
Associate Professor
Giovanni Merlino is Associate Professor of Computer Science Engineering at the Department of Engineering of the University of Messina. His research treats IoT and cyber-physical systems as software-defined infrastructure, with a focus on IT/OT convergence and on decentralization protocols. He conceived the I/Ocloud paradigm, contributed to the design of the Stack4Things middleware, and co-founded the academic spin-off SmartMe.IO.
Manuel Fabiano
PhD Student
Manuel Fabiano works on the security of industrial control systems, designed long before the threats they now face. His research applies post-quantum cryptography and decentralized identity to legacy industrial protocols, with energy infrastructure as its application domain.
Giovanni Lombardo
PhD Student
Giovanni Lombardo's research follows two lines. One concerns the security and virtualization of automotive and distributed systems, from intrusion detection on in-vehicle networks to hypervisors spanning distributed infrastructure. The other applies machine learning to hyperspectral sensing, for the non-invasive monitoring of crops.