ulno.net ulno – You will know.

Research

My research is driven by the goal of making technology accessible and practical, with a strong bias toward applied results. It sits at the intersection of the Internet of Things, distributed and embedded systems, and Extended Reality — and increasingly around the question of digital sovereignty.

Current interests

  • Internet of Things — frameworks, home and building automation, actors/sensors, mobile and embedded systems.
  • Edge and cloud computing — distributed architectures, virtualization, decentralized and energy-efficient system designs.
  • Digital sovereignty — self-hosting, privacy-preserving systems, on-premise AI, and sustainable computing (for example repurposing e-waste smartphones as tiny data centers).
  • Extended Reality (XR) — VR/AR work environments, teleoperation, and digital twins connected to IoT.
  • Software engineering — DevOps, Story Driven Modeling, agile and model-driven engineering.
  • Security and privacy — in IoT, home automation, Industry 4.0, and self-hosted infrastructure.
  • Active learning & community building — and using both in teaching.
  • IoTempower — an open-source IoT and edge framework used for teaching and research at several European universities (iotempower.us).
  • Repurposing e-waste smartphones as tiny data centers — with colleagues at the University of Tartu (IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2025).
  • Tartu Hackerspace — building a community space for digital sovereignty and making (supported by the XRP Ledger Foundation).

Selected publications

A full, always-current list is on Google Scholar; see also ORCID and DBLP. Recent highlights:

  • TOAD: Profiling and Evaluating 3D Printed IoT Rapid Prototype Designs, ACM Transactions on Internet of Things, 2025.
  • Decentralized Proof-of-Location systems for trust, scalability, and privacy in digital societies, Scientific Reports, 2025.
  • Supporting Sustainable Computing by Repurposing E-Waste Smartphones as Tiny Data Centers, IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2025.
  • IoT Educational Framework Case Study: Devices as Things for Hands-on Collaboration, Journal of Engineering Education Transformations, 2024.

Elsewhere