Rute C. Sofia (PhD 2004) is the Industrial IoT Head at fortiss - research institute of the Free State of Bavaria for software intensive services and systems. She is also an Invited Associate Professor of University Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, and an Associate Researcher at ISTAR, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. Rute's research background has been developed on industrial and on academic context. She was a co-founder of the COPELABS research unit, and the COPELABS scientific director (2013-2017), where she was a Senior Researcher (2010-2019). She has co-founded the Portuguese startup Senception Lda (2013-2019), a startup focused on personal communication platforms.

Her current research interests are: network architectures and protocols; IoT; Edge computing; in-network computing; network mining. Rute holds over 60 peer-reviewed publications in her fields of expertise, and 9 patents. She is an ACM Europe Councilor (2021-2025); an ACM Senior member, an IEEE Senior Member. She was an IEEE ComSoc N2Women Awards co-chair (2020-2021).

Before fortiss, she was an Associate Professor (COPELABS/ULHT, wireless/user-centric networking; sensing; IoT); she co-lead as senior researcher the "Internet Architectures and Networking" area of UTM, INESC-TEC (07-10), focus on wireless/cellular network architectures and user-centric networking; she was (04-07) a senior research scientist in Siemens AG and Nokia-Siemens Networks GmbH, focusing on aspects such as: fixed-mobile convergence; carrier-grade Ethernet; QoS; IPv6 interoperability.

Rute holds a BEng in Informatics Engineering by Universidade de Coimbra (1995); M.Sc.(1999) and Ph.D. (2004) in Informatics by Universidade de Lisboa. During her PhD studies, she was a visiting scholar (2000-2003) at Northwestern University (ICAIR) and at University of Pennsylvania, MNLab, coordinated by Roch Guerin.

Rute holds a BEng in Informatics Engineering by Universidade de Coimbra (1995); M.Sc.(1999) and Ph.D. (2004, “Summa cum Laude”) in Informatics by Universidade de Lisboa. During her PhD studies, she was a visiting scholar (2000-2003) at Northwestern University (ICAIR) and at University of Pennsylvania.