In January 2023 I formally completed my double master’s degree: the MSc in Systems, Control and Robotics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, August 2021 – January 2023) and the MSc in Telecommunication Engineering at the ETSIT, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) (September 2020 – January 2023, finished with a 9/10) — earned with one single thesis that was accepted by both universities, defended in autumn 2022.
A double degree sounds exotic, but it is a surprisingly elegant mechanism: ETSIT-UPM runs 30 international double degrees with partner universities across Europe, Asia and the US, and instead of writing one thesis per programme, you write one — supervised by researchers from both sides — and it counts for both degrees. My own single thesis was the Digital Twin Knowledge Graphs for IoT Platforms degree project, carried out entirely at Ericsson Research.
📸 KTH scenes
Stockholm in 2021–2023: an international classroom (the tally of nationalities on the board — Sweden dominates, and Italy is proudly marked with π), autumn campus walks, and the ivy-covered KTH main building with its “Vetenskap och konst” crest.
🎓 The two programmes
KTH — MSc Systems, Control and Robotics: a master focused on the analysis, design and control of robots, autonomous vehicles and other complex technical systems, with specialisations in autonomous sensing, AI, machine learning, decision making and control. This is where I learned to think in state spaces, feedback and estimation — and where the robotics thread of my career started.
ETSIT UPM — MSc in Telecommunication Engineering (MUIT): the telecom engineering master at Spain’s top telecommunications school, covering advanced communications, networks and signal processing — and the degree that formally qualifies you as a Telecommunications Engineer in Spain.
The double degree is structured so you study part of the programme at each university, and the mobility year abroad replaces a year at home — one diploma from UPM, one from KTH, one shared thesis in the middle.
🔧 The single thesis, at Ericsson Research
The degree project — Digital Twin Knowledge Graphs for IoT Platforms: Towards a Virtual Model for Real-Time Knowledge Representation in IoT Platforms (30 ECTS, School of EECS at KTH) — was developed as a 7-month internship (June – December 2022) in the Ericsson Research IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems department. Concretely, I designed a client that listens to the flow of messages from IoT devices in a network and processes those messages automatically in real time to build a virtual model based on a knowledge graph. The purpose of that knowledge graph is to provide meaningful insights about the platform’s status — insights that help optimize its behaviour and react against potential issues quickly. It tackled the “semantic-telemetry divide”: bridging the static semantic models of IoT platforms with the live time-series telemetry of real devices, so a digital twin can reason about its physical counterpart in real time.
The team behind it:
- Dr. Bin Xiao — Ericsson Research, Department of IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems (industrial supervisor)
- Prof. Bo Wahlberg — KTH EECS, Division of Decision and Control Systems (academic supervisor)
- Prof. Pedro J. Zufiria — ETSIT UPM, Department of Applied Mathematics (academic supervisor)
- Prof. Cristian Rojas — KTH EECS, Division of Decision and Control Systems (examiner)
One thesis, three supervisors from industry and academia on two campuses, one examiner — and in the end two degrees. The full technical deep-dive — the knowledge-graph architecture, the semantic integration experiments and the embedding-matcher benchmark — lives in its own blog post.
The complete thesis is uploaded here, and it is also published in KTH’s DiVA repository:
MSc-Thesis-KG-IoT-Digital-Twin.pdf · DiVA record (diva2:1769438)
Thesis PDF KTH DiVA KTH · Systems, Control and Robotics ETSIT UPM · MSc Telecommunication Engineering ETSIT UPM · Double Degrees KTH × UPM · Ericsson Research