Mário Alves was born in 1968 and has a Degree (1991), a MSc (1995) and a PhD (2003) in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Porto, Portugal. He is a Professor in ECE at the Polytechnic Institute of Porto (ISEP/IPP) and a Research Associate and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) research line leader at the CISTER Research Unit, the only Portuguese centre in Electrical and Computer Science and Engineering graded 'Excellent' in two consecutive evaluations from the national science foundation (FCT). In the past, he participated in several international projects related to industrial communication systems, developing his MSc and PhD in sinergy with a couple of  them (CNMA, RFieldbus). He has been serving as a reviewer and publishing in top-notch conferences (e.g. RTSS, ECRTS, ICDCS, OPODIS, MASS, EWSN) and journals (e.g. ACM TOSN, IEEE TII, Elsevier ComNet/Automatica/Ad-Hoc Net, Springer RTSJ) in his expertise areas, got best paper awards (e.g. ECRTS’07) and supervised the EWSN'09 best MSc Thesis award. He has been actively participating in the organization of several international conferences and workshops (e.g. EWSN, ECRTS, IEEE WFCS, CONET). His personal research interests are mainly devoted to supporting quality-of-service (QoS) in large-scale and dense WSNs, mainly based on standard and COTS technology. He is currently involved in several national and international projects and networks of excellence, namely leading WP4 in the EMMON ARTEMIS project, the COTS4QoS research cluster in the CONET NoE, the ART-WiSe/open-ZB frameworks and the MASQOTS FCT project. The WSN team at CISTER has been attaining many important achievements and international visibility, such as 1) deploying the largest WSN test-bed in Europe so far (300+ nodes, under the EMMON project); 2) scoring over 115000 visits and 6000 downloads of the open-ZB toolset; and 3) being founding members of and active contributors to the TinyOS 15.4 and ZigBee Working Groups.