Telecommunications and Multimedia

About the Centre

The Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia (CTM) welcomes close to 200 members, including at least 100 integrated researchers who carry out scientific work in the fields of communications, Artificial Intelligence, and computer science and engineering.

The Centre’s activities cover several Research and Development (R&D) domains:

Communications and Electronics
- Radio Frequency Technologies
- Optoelectronics
- Microelectronics
- Wireless Communication Networks
Computer Perception
- Computer Vision applied to Medical Imaging
- Computer Vision applied to Digital Media
- Computer Audio applied to Music

With multidisciplinary teams that include dozens of PhDs, CTM is strongly committed to both European and national research projects, as well as consultancy projects with industry.

Centre Areas

Radio and Electronics Engineering

The Radio and Electronics Engineering area aims to develop solutions for future communication, computing, and sensing systems, based on expertise in microwaves, integrated photonics, digital and analogue electronics, and signal processing. These solutions are applied in radio/optical communications, human sensing, and embedded computing. In this context, research is focused on three complementary strands: the development of antennas and reconfigurable devices, exploring heterogeneous architectures and neuromorphic computing to enhance efficiency and adaptability to operational conditions; the pursuit of sustainable approaches, including antennas and electronic circuits based on 3D printing and materials that promote economic and environmental sustainability; and the integration of multi-modal communication and sensing, combining radio and video to enhance system performance and robustness.

Wireless Networks

WiN (Wireless Networks) is a research area focused on R&D in wireless communication networks, with the vision of connecting all objects and people to the Internet, even in extreme scenarios. The mission of the area is to develop autonomous communication systems – that is, systems that are intelligent, self-managed, scalable, and capable of understanding the context in which they operate. To fulfil this mission, our research focuses on the following key topics: simulation, self-configuration, cross-layer optimisation, radio resource management, mobility management, and Digital Twins.

Multimedia and Communication Technologies

MCT (Multimedia Communications Technologies) conducts research on topics involving the analysis of multimodal signals (video, real and synthetic images, audio, and text) for the intelligent extraction of information that enables the optimisation and automation of processes across various application verticals. The team has strong expertise in areas such as computer vision, intelligent systems and machine learning, generative AI, music computing, augmented reality, content recommendation, and multimedia communication protocols and architectures. The range of application knowledge is broad and includes the media and creative industries, security and video surveillance, manufacturing, and emerging applications such as autonomous driving, intelligent data visualisation, emotion recognition, and language models.

Visual Computing and Machine Intelligence

VCMI (Visual Computing and Machine Intelligence) is a research area focused on the application of machine learning methodologies to the challenging conditions posed by visual data. The development of intelligent decision-support systems is based on the visual understanding of data, combined with other available information, thereby enhancing the analysis and decision-making process. This area’s mission is to contribute significantly to the next generation of intelligent systems by equipping them with reasoning capabilities based on various data types, such as images, video, or other signals. We conduct research on both fundamental and applied problems in computer vision, image processing, machine learning, and decision-support systems grounded in automatic data analysis. Within these main research directions, our group places particular emphasis on specific domains, such as medical image analysis; biometrics and biological signal analysis; driver/passenger monitoring and autonomous driving; and more fundamental topics in computer vision, such as ordinal classification.