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 in Munich, Germany. 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, and she has co-founded COPELABS (2012-2019, Lisbon, Portugal), research unit which she also steered between 2013-2017. and where she was a Senior Researcher until 2019. She has co-founded Senception Lda (2013), a startup focused on personal communication platforms. Her current research interests are: network architectures and protocols; IoT; edge computing; in-network computation; network mining. Rute holds over 60 peer-reviewed publications in her fields of expertise, and 9 patents. She is an ACM Senior member and an ACM Europe Councilor, and an IEEE Senior Member. She is also an N2Women Awards Co-chair.

Before COPELABS/ULHT, she was a senior researcher at INESC TEC (07-10, Porto, Portugal), where she steered the "Internet Architectures and Networking" area of UTM, team dedicated to wireless/cellular networking architectures and to user-centric networking paradigms. She was (04-07, Munich, Germany) 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, “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.