Email Address: [email protected]
Marco Ruffini is Professor and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, where he leads the OpenIreland laboratory and the Optical and Wireless Networks Research Group. His research interests focus on transforming communication infrastructures into intelligent, adaptive and context-aware systems that seamlessly integrate optical, wireless, and cloud technologies, with particular emphasis on access-metro convergence, AI-driven control and orchestration, digital twins of optical networks, and emerging quantum networking architectures. In his role within ADAPT, Professor Ruffini investigates how networks can evolve from passive transport platforms into programmable systems capable of perceiving and responding to their environment. His current ADAPT related work explores the dual use of telecom optical fibres as both communication infrastructure and large scale sensing platforms. As Principal Investigator of the Sea-Scan project, he applies AI enhanced Distributed Acoustic Sensing to detect and track dark vessels, transforming subsea telecom fibres into distributed maritime sensors. He also studies State of Polarization based sensing techniques with machine learning to detect physical threats to terrestrial infrastructure. Professor Ruffini has authored over 230 publications, holds 12 patents, secured more than €15 million in research funding, and contributed to industry standards, including introducing the virtual Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (vDBA) concept adopted by the Broadband Forum.
