Juan Manuel Murillo Rodríguez

Short Bio

My academic career began in 1994 at the University of Extremadura (UEx), where I am currently a Full Professor in the field of Software Engineering. Over these years, I have participated in more than 30 competitive research projects, leading most of them, with funding exceeding 4 million euros. I have also developed extensive collaborations with private companies in over 25 contracts, also leading the majority of them, with funding totaling more than 3 million euros. This has earned me four six-year research periods, one additional period for transfer activities, and the Award of Excellence for the Transfer of Research Results from UEx in 2020. All these activities have been carried out within the Quercus Software Engineering Group, which I helped found in 1996 under the direction of Prof. Juan Hernández Núñez. After his retirement, I became the lead researcher of the group. I also lead one of the group's laboratories, the SPILab (Social and Pervasive Innovation Lab), which includes 18 members of the Quercus group.

During my career, I have conducted research in several areas, initially developing them and later leading them and opening new research directions in the group. Initially, I focused on Advanced Separation of Concerns (Aspects) and its application to self-adaptive systems. Since 2012, with SPILab, I have been more dedicated to building distributed and service-oriented architectures for mobile applications. Our main contributions have been the Internet of People (IoP) concept and the People as a Service (PeaaS) architecture, which have contributed to the development of the Computing concept. Our latest work in this area deals with optimizing the deployment of mobile applications, considering the infrastructure from the cloud to the computing continuum. Finally, in 2019, my interest in quantum computing, which had been a hobby for years, led to the launch of a new research line in the group. This line is currently being developed with remarkable success in terms of results, contributions, and national and international projection. I am especially proud to have been able to co-organize the first Dagstuhl Seminar on Quantum Software Engineering and to have participated in the publication 'Quantum Software Engineering: Roadmap and Challenges,' accepted for publication at ACM TOSEM, which describes some of the challenges that this discipline will face in the coming years for its development and which has been developed in collaboration with a large group of pioneering researchers in this area.

In terms of knowledge transfer, the most important contribution has been the founding of the startup GLOIN in 2010 with Dr. José Manuel García Alonso and Dr. José Javier Berrocal Olmeda, which continues to operate and grow. In 2012, the company won Launchpad Denmark, a competition in which more than 200 companies from around the world participated. GLOIN presented itself with the PeaaS-based nimBees tool. Since its inception, I managed the company until 2015. Motivated by developments in our application areas, I have recently co-founded a new startup (HAT - Health and Ageing Tech).

All this activity has been combined with various management activities and contributions to research and society from the local to the international scope. Thus, at the university level, from 2007 to 2010, I was Vice-Rector for Information and Communication Technologies at the University of Extremadura. During the period from 2019 to 2022, I founded and managed the European Projects Office at the University of Extremadura. I am particularly proud of this activity as it contributed to the Community of Extremadura leaving the last positions in attracting European R&D funds. At the regional level, from June 2022 to November 2023, I was Managing Director of the COMPUTAEX foundation, for which I have developed a project to improve and grow research results and knowledge transfer and integration with the University of Extremadura. This foundation manages the regional supercomputing center in the region and is also a member of the RES ICTS network (Spanish Supercomputing Network). At the national level, I am a member of the SISTEDES Board of Directors and Secretary of its Permanent Commission. I am also the coordinator of the Spanish Excellence Network on Service Oriented Computing (RCIS) consisting of research groups from 15 Spanish universities focusing in SOC. At the international level, I am a member of the editorial board of journals such as IEEE Transactions on Services Computing or Computing. Also, in 2025, I have been invited to be Program Co-chair at different scientific events such as the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC), IEEE Quantum Week - Quantum Systems Software (track QSYS at QCE 2025), and MEDES 2025 - International Conference on Management of Digital Ecosystems. It is an honour for me to work actively and maintain a high level of commitment to the development of the international Service-Oriented Computing community, and in particular to the development of the community around ICSOC, where I have been an author, PC member, Senior PC member, Area Chair, and Keynote. I am equally proud to contribute to the development of the ICWE (International Conference on Web Engineering) community where I have been an author, PC member, part of the organising committee on different occasions, Program Chair, Organizing Chair and member of the Steering Committee.

In my personal life, I really enjoy spending time with family and friends, some of whom I've been lucky enough to meet through my work. I love walking in the countryside and hiking in the mountains. I'm passionate about music and an avid audiophile. I also take pleasure in tough manual tasks like restoring old items such as cast iron stoves or cookers