Sustainable Data Centers
Life Cycle Assessment
Carbon-Aware Computing
Energy Grid-Data Center Integration
Procurement Planning

Heterogeneous Systems
CPU/GPU/FPGA/CGRA
Hardware-Software Co-Design
Performance Optimization
Energy-Efficiency
Reconfigurable Computing

Privacy & Confidentiality
Confidential & Trusted Computing
Federated Learning
Privacy-Preserving AI
Secure Distributed Computing
Blockchain

Healthcare & Scientific Computing
Radio Astronomy
Urban Digital Twins
Biomedical Wearables
Genetic Care

Digital presence

* Personal website: denisa-c.com
* GitHub: denisa-c
* LinkedIn: here
* Google Scholar: here
* ORCID: 0000-0001-6736-5715
* DBLP: here
* ResearchGate: here

Beyond research

My paintings gallery
Instagram artist page: @abies.d.alba

ABOUT ME

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the High Performance Computing (HPC) research group at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Basel. My research focuses on sustainable and energy-efficient computing, spanning HPC, artificial intelligence (AI), heterogeneous and reconfigurable architectures, and edge AI computing. I am particularly interested in the co-design of algorithms, software, and hardware to improve performance, energy efficiency, scalability, and environmental sustainability. My work covers applications ranging from AI/HPC data centers and radio astronomy to urban digital twins, environmental sensing, biomedical wearables, and autonomous robot navigation.

Before joining the University of Basel, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL), EPFL where I contributed as a researcher, project manager, grant writer, teaching assistant, and supervisor of PhD and master students. I received my Ph.D. in Mechatronics from the University of Málaga in 2022. My doctoral research investigated energy efficiency and productivity for decision-making in mobile robot navigation. I previously earned a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Málaga and a B.Eng. in Automatics and Applied Informatics from the University Politehnica of Bucharest.

Mentoring and education are an important part of my academic work. I have supervised and mentored PhD and Master’s student projects in sustainable computing, FPGA acceleration, Edge AI, scientific computing, and hardware-software co-design. Since 2024, I have served as a mentor with IMFAHE, supporting doctoral researchers in research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. From 2018 to 2022, I contributed to Campus Tech Chicas at the University of Málaga, delivering workshops for teenage girls on programming, web development, prototyping with Arduino, and design thinking.

I have contributed to organizing and chairing of international conferences and workshops in computing at PASC (e.g., Sustainable Computing for Big Data Infrastructures and 2nd Sustainable Computing for AI and Data-Intensive Infrastructures) and AMLD. I served as program committee in ICPP Applications, SC BoF, CEDI, and SARTECO reviewer for ACM TECS, The Journal of Supercomputing, and ACM womENcourage.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Sustainable AI, HPC, and data centers
* CEO-DC: Driving Decarbonization in HPC Data Centers with Actionable Insights (arXiv).
* GridPilot: Real-Time Grid-Responsive Control for AI Supercomputers (arXiv, code).
* astroCAMP: A Community Benchmark and Co-Design Framework for Sustainable SKA-Scale Radio Imaging (paper, arXiv, code, dataset).

Urban, environmental, and Edge AI
* AquaCast: Urban Water Dynamics Forecasting with Precipitation-Informed Multi-Input Transformer (paper, arXiv, code).
* Pollin8: Species-Level Pollinator and Pest Counting on a Milliwatt System-on-Chip (code, conference).

Biomedical, digital health, and low-power Edge AI
* FADE: Forecasting for Anomaly Detection on ECG (paper, arXiv).
* Cough-E: A Multimodal, Privacy-Preserving Cough Detection Algorithm for the Edge (paper, arXiv, code).
* BiomedBench: A Benchmark Suite of TinyML Biomedical Applications for Low-Power Wearables (paper, project, arXiv).

Privacy-preserving, federated & trusted computing
* Enabling Uncertainty-Aware Time-Series Forecasting in Federated Learning for Urban Water Dynamics (paper).
* Decentralised Blockchain-based Solutions for Electronic Healthcare Record with Interacting Social Networking Components (paper).
* ClinicAppChain: A Low-Cost Blockchain Hyperledger Solution for Healthcare (paper).

For more, check my personal website.

RESEARCH PROJECTS

* Family Gene Toolkit: A digital service to support genetic care in Europe
* SEAMS — Sustainable & Energy Aware Methods for SKA
* UrbanTwin — integrated urban digital twins for sustainability
* SwissChips — semiconductor and integrated-circuit innovation in Switzerland
* TYRELL — Time-Ready Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Skills and Tasks
* SKACH / SERI-SKA — sustainable scientific computing for the Square Kilometre Array