Ivana Podnar Žarko is a Full Professor at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Croatia, where she teaches courses on distributed systems and Internet of Things. She was the Technical Manager of the H2020 project symbIoTe: Symbiosis of smart objects across IoT environments (2016-2018), and has participated in a number of research projects (EU-funded and national), including the well-cited FP7 project OpenIoT. Prof. Podnar Žarko is currently leading the Internet of Things Laboratory at the University of Zagreb and participates in the Centre of Research Excellence for Data Science and Advanced Cooperative Systems, the first national center of excellence in the field of technical sciences in Croatia. She is currently leading two national projects: IoT-Field funded by European Structural and Investment Funds, and IoT4us funded by Croatian Science Foundation. 

Ivana Podnar Žarko co-authored more than 80 scientific journal and conference papers in the area of large-scale distributed systems, IoT, and Big Data processing. Recently she focuses on research problems related to IoT interoperability and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). She has served as a program committee member for many international conferences and workshops (e.g., IEEE Globecom, IEEE 5G World Forum, Global IoT Summit, IEEE ICC) and is co-organizing a series of research workshops Int. Workshop on Interoperability and Open Source Solutions for the IoT (InterOSS-IoT) from 2014.