Personal Presentation

João P. Vilela is a professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Porto and a centre coordinator at CRACS/INESC TEC. He was previously a professor at the Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra, after receiving the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Porto in 2011, and a visiting researcher at Georgia Tech and MIT, USA. Dr. Vilela has been coordinator and team member of several national, bilateral, and European-funded projects in security and privacy. His main research interests are in security and privacy of computer and communication systems, with applications such as wireless networks, and mobile devices. Specific research topics include wireless physical-layer security, security of next-generation networks, privacy-preserving mechine learning, location privacy and automated privacy protection.

João Vilela has been the general chair of ACM CODASPY 2024, track-chair for the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference 2023 and is an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security since April 2025. He has been an expert project evaluator for the CHIST-ERA ERA-NET, the European Union Horizon Europe programme, the National Research Fund of Luxembourg, and the Dutch Research Council of Netherlands. Dr. Vilela has presented his research work on relevant international institutions such as PUC-Rio, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Unicamp and University of São Paulo (Brazil), IMDEA Networks (Spain), INRIA (France), Harvard University and MIT (USA), and University of Cambridge (UK), among others.