From June 24th to July 4th, 2024, Dimitra Tsigkari from Telefonica Research visited NOVA University Lisbon in the context of the TaRDIS project. She met with João Leitão, Carla Ferreira (the project coordinator), Nuno Preguiça, and João Costa Seco, and they worked closely together on pending tasks and future research directions.

Dimitra Tsigkari with João Leitão, Carla Ferreira (the project coordinator) and Nuno Preguiça
Nuno Preguiça, Carla Ferreira (the project coordinator), Dimitra Tsigkari, and João Leitão

The visit was very productive and the team managed to:

  • Discuss in detail Telefonica’s use case and its requirements in the context of the increasing importance of swarm intelligence;
  • Work on how the tools NOVA (under the direction of João Leitão) is building on overlay networks could be implemented in the use case while minimizing the developer’s effort (a key objective of TaRDIS);
  • Brainstorm on how the integration of the TaRDIS tools in the use case and the final evaluation could be designed in a way that highlights the core values of the TaRDIS vision. 
Dimitra Tsigkari giving a talk entitled “Split Learning and its Optimization Challenges”

Moreover, Dimitra gave a talk entitled “Split Learning and its Optimization Challenges” at the NOVA LINCS seminar of the department of Computer Science. This talk was related to the topics that she studies within TaRDIS and could be the canvas for collaborations between Telefonica and NOVA. Finally, they discussed how such collaborations could be established even beyond the duration of the project.