A successful thesis defense involves many people

Enrolling in a Computer Science PhD means riding a roller coaster of hard work, disappointment and joy, of illusion and delusion, of designing, coding, analysing, writing, presenting… Doing it after more than 20 years’ experience in the industry may be described by many people as a pure act of insanity. Starting it three months before the COVID-19 lockdown, a hard test of mental stability and tenacity. But no human or artificial intelligence was able to predict that. 

Under these circumstances, I successfully managed to publish all my work in great conferences and journals, and I finally defended my thesis with a cum laude mention this week at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Many thanks to the committee Pablo Rodriguez, PhD, Georgios Smaragdakis, and Ángel Cuevas. It was indeed an interesting session.

It is probably my closest family that has the clearest idea about the amount of work and energy behind this dissertation. It is Irene Belinchón Visier, my wife, and my children, Lucía, Jaime and Javier, that have suffered my sudden mood swings as reviews, rejections and acceptances have followed one after the other over the last three and a half years. So big thanks to all of you for being there and for not kicking a sometimes nasty PhD candidate out of your life!

I would like to thank Nikolaos Laoutaris, my supervisor, for coming up with this crazy PhD, for betting for a seasoned consultant like me to execute it, and for his advice, mind-blowing brainstorming sessions and all the support he provided during the process. Thanks also to my co-authors Costas Iordanou and Marius Paraschiv for their help in writing our joint papers and their valuable advice. And thanks to my teammates in the Data Transparency Group, Tianyue Chu, Elisa Cabana Garceran del Vall, Devriş İşler, and Alvaro Garcia-Recuero, and to the rest of the crew at IMDEA Networks Institute for bearing with me the last years.

Some other people have indirectly helped me with this PhD. On the personal side, my family (parents and sisters, blood and -in-law) and beloved lifelong friends supported cutting-edge research with love, beer, talks, walks, barbecues, wine and laughs. Intangible yet invaluable tools to stabilise the mind and accelerate the production of code and revolutionary ideas. Many thanks to you all, always.

On the professional side, thanks to my ex-colleagues in Axon Partners Group, Deloitte Consulting and Telefónica, with some of whom I still keep close contact. Together with my teachers and professors in the far old college (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) and school years, they have shaped me and taught me almost everything I used to succeed in this ambitious undertaking.

Although it is only one person that signs a doctoral dissertation, many more people behind the scenes have contributed to that piece of research. That is why hereinafter I intentionally avoided using the first person singular in the manuscript you can find here.