• Office: D625 (Building II)    /  Pigeonhole: 305
• Phone: +351 21 765 05 75 / Extension 22 0754 (internal calls only)
• Address (view):
    ISCTE-IUL
    Av. das Forças Armadas 1649-026 Lisbon
    Portugal
• School Admin. Office: +351 21 046 40 13 / Extension: 291300 (internal calls only)

Education

• PhD in Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK. (Viva Exam in December 2011; degree conferred in July 2012.)
  
  
• M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2 years degree), Telecomunications profile, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal, 2003
  
  
• Licenciatura in Electrical and Computer Engineering (5 years degree), Telecomunications profile, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal, 1998.

• Oct. 2026: our paper "Largely Constrained Noise-guessing Decoding of Short LDPC codes" has been published in the in IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society, [IEEEXplore]. The paper proposes a groundbreaking technique for low-lattency decoding of short LDPCs. This reseach was made in colaboration of  Prof. João Ribeiro (IST, Math Dep) and with Prof. Carlos Salema. We were previlegied and honoured by this collaboration with prof. Carlos Salema.
  

• July 2026: Sahar Allahkaram successfully defended her PhD on the 28th July, approved with Distinction unanimously by the examination committee was composed by Prof. Muriel Medard (MIT), Dr. Marco Gomes (U. Coimbra), and Dr. Nuno Souto (Iscte), and chaired by Prof. Américo Correia (Iscte). Sahar's thesis, titled "Signal Processing and Coding Techniques for 6G Ultra-reliable Low-latency Wireless Machine-type Communications", mostly focused on techniques to make the noise-guessing decoders for short-blocklength error correction codes even faster, including in massive-MIMO setups. It was wonderful to have in the examination committee prof. Muriel Medard, inventor and leading researcher on noise-guessing decoding, among so many other contributions.

• Jan. 2026: We are pleased to welcome Dr. Nizar Khalfet as visiting researcher during 6 months at IT and Iscte (January 2026 until July 2026). Nizar visiting us as a secondment funded by the EU project COALESCE. Nizar obtained the MSc. degree in Telecommunication from CentraleSupélec, France, in 2016, and the the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 2020 at INRIA, Lyon, France. Since 2020, he is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cyprus in Prof. Ioannis Krikidis' group.
  

• Nov. 2025: our paper "Constrained Symbol-Level Noise-Guessing Decoding with Antenna Sorting for Massive MIMO"  resulting from a fruitful and wonderful collaboration with Dr. Ioannis Chatzigeorgiou (Lancaster Univ., UK), has been accepted in the IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society (impact factor 6.1) and is now on [IEEEXplore].
  

• Oct 2025: we had two papers being presented in IEEE conferences on the last week of Oct:
  i) Asilomar 2025, Pacific Grove, CA, presenting a GPU decoder for quantum LDPCs below Google's 63 µs latency threshold, in colllabolation with colleagues from Coimbra Univ.;
  ii) ISNCC 2025, Paris, France, presenting for the 1st time the list of Lindström's integers that allow unique-sum sequences for the adder channel.

• Aug. 2025: Our paper "Fault-tolerant noise guessing decoding of quantum random codes" has been published in the IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering, proposing a quantum-GRAND decoder that is able to cope with preparation errors, measurement errots, and noisy gates, to a level that can be made practical [IEEE Xplore].

• Jan. 2025: our 2023 paper proposing noise-guessing decoding of quantum random linear codes (for which no decoder existed until then) was listed as the most recent milestone on the timeline of quantum error-correction codes milestones on the paper surveying quantum information & communications and accepted for the an upcoming issue of the  prestigious Proceedings of the IEEE, authored by the leading reseachers in this field. Our 2024 proposal to use noise-guessing to link purification is also cited in the same survey.
  

• Sep. 2024: Our paper "Efficient entanglement purification based on noise guessing decoding" has been published in the prestigious Quantum journal. By using a duality between error correction and link purification, we have proposed a much more efficient technique for purification of quantum links: Purification-GRAND (PGRAND) [Quantum]

• Oct. 2023: Our Quantum-GRAND (QGRAND) proposal for quantum error correction has just been accepted for publication in IEEE Access [IEEEXplore].
  
  
• April 2023: We have proposed a new metric and a new tool to be used in routing in quantum networks. The proposed metric is based on "fidelity vs entanglement probability" curves. Submitted to Physical Review A: [ArXiv].
  

• Feb. 2023: Three journal papers published in their final version in Jan/Feb 2023:
  i) Symbol-level GRAND in IEEE Communications Letters [IEEEXplore];
  and two papers on routing on quantum networks:
  ii) point-to-point entanglement in IEEE Access [IEEEXplore];
  iii) multipartite entanglement in the Quantum journal [Quantum].

• Sep. 2022: GRAND decoding over massive MIMO presented and published in VTC-Spring 2022, London [IEEEXplore].
  

• Aug. 2022: Decoding any error correction code! A triplet of papers based on noise-centric decoding was just made available:
  i) applying for the first time GRAND in coded massive MIMO and seeing how RLCs outperform 5G's polar codes [ArXiv];
  ii) showing that switching from bit-level GRAND to symbol-level GRAND can reduce computational complexity by half or more [ArXiv];
  iii) extending GRAND to decoding quantum RLCs, with the proposal of Q-GRAND. [ArXiv]
  It was very rewarding to work on these ideas at this stage with co-authors with whom it is a pleasure to work with while exploring ideas in fundamental research.
  
  
• June 2021: Very proud  to seeing our work on MIMO for wireless energy transfer published in the prestigious IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing [IEEEXplore] [ArXiv] [5min video].
  
  
• Dec. 2018: on sabbatical leave from Feb. 2019 until Feb. 2020, visiting/collaborating with a number of research groups abroad.

• May 2019: Co-organising the Workshop of the Quantum Internet Alliance in Lisbon (93 participants from around Europe) [more photos: 1, 2, 3, 4].

• April 2019: Leading IUL's rank of reviewers according to Publons and in the top positions worldwide in the relevant research fields: 4G, 5G, info.theory, dig.comms, MIMO comms, wireless and mob. comms. In the wider areas: EEC (top 2%), ECE , sig.proc. (top 1%). In the top positions within IT (which spans many areas).

• Aug. 2018: We have successefuly organised ISWCS 2018 in Lisbon (205 participants from all over the world, first-class keynote speakers, state-of-the-art tutorials,...)

• May 2017:  Our paper on Fast Matrix inversion for massive MIMO is listed in the "Top Downloads in IEEE Xplore [Reader's Choice]" compiled by the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine in the May 2017 issue, listing the top-10 most downloaded papers during the last 2 two years from the IEEE Sig. Proc. Letters.