OPEN 5G - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the Organizing Team
Job Titles:
- Product Manager for NVIDIA 5G Aerial
Anupa Kelkar is the product manager for NVIDIA 5G Aerial converged radio access and edge compute platform. She has over 20 years of telecommunications and networking industry experience in software engineering and product management leadership spanning wireline, wireless, and satellite networks. Before NVIDIA, she worked at Apple in product incubation for AR/VR low-latency on-device, cloud, and edge-use cases and at Qualcomm in the connected cars (CV2X) ecosystem. And if you ever fly JetBlue, United, Continental, or Quantas, the inflight broadband connectivity over satellite networks was her focus while at ViaSat. Anupa graduated from University of California Berkeley in electrical engineering and computer science.
Job Titles:
- Research Associate
- Software Engineer
David Johnson is a Research Associate and software engineer in the Flux Research Group in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. He joined the Flux Research Group as a staff member in 2006 and completed his M.S. degree in Computer Science in 2010. His research encompasses a broad range of systems software: mobile and wired networks, cloud computing, security, and operating systems.
Job Titles:
- Director for RIC Architecture and O - RAN Standards at Mavenir
Dr. Rajarajan (Raj) Sivaraj is a Director for RIC architecture and O-RAN standards at Mavenir at Dallas, Texas, where he has been working since Sept 2020. At Mavenir, he is responsible for the R&D, standardization and productization of the O-RAN-architected RAN Intelligent Controller function. He invented the first protocol design and the generic encoding scheme that enables the RAN intelligent Control function to "control" the RAN at an individual user-level that got adopted by O-RAN standards. He is also additionally involved in 5G RAN systems design, optimization, and characterization of system performance. Prior to Mavenir, he was a Senior Inventive Scientist with AT&T labs research based out of San Ramon in California, where he was involved in design and optimization of cellular RAN as well as cross-layer mobile networks. While at AT&T, he developed the first O-RAN RIC extensible applications that were successfully tested in a live 5G production network. Previously, he finished his PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Davis, in Dec 2016, where his thesis was focused on "Radio Resource Management for advanced OFDMA networks" and he was awarded an honors for his outstanding graduate research. He has published and patented about 20+ research works in this space in leading conferences and journals. He has also collaborated extensively in the industry, having worked with Microsoft Research, Intel labs, NEC Laboratories, Broadcom, etc. and has worked in 5 different countries USA, UK, France, Australia and India.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Organizing Team
Leonardo Bonati is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. He received his B.S. in Information Engineering and his M.S. in Telecommunication Engineering from University of Padova, Italy in 2014 and 2016, respectively. He served on the technical program committee of ACM WiNTECH 2020-2021, and as guest editor of the special issue of Elsevier's Computer Networks journal on Advances in Experimental Wireless Platforms and Systems. His research interests focus on 5G and beyond cellular networks, network slicing, and software-defined networking for wireless networks.
Matti has over 20 years experience in the telco industry as a researcher with focus on distributed and fault tolerant systems. He has been involved with the OSC RIC project since its inception and has help designed many of the RIC platform features and xApps to support the OSC use cases. Matti acted as the PTL for the RICAPP project that is responsible for open source xApps in OSC until Fall 2021. At AT&T, Matti has been extensively involved in the design and execution of trials on O-RAN technology.
Job Titles:
- Canada Research Chair in AI
Melike Erol-Kantarci is Canada Research Chair in AI-enabled Next-Generation Wireless Networks and Associate Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa. She is the founding director of the Networked Systems and Communications Research (NETCORE) laboratory. She is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute, Toronto, and the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at University of Ottawa. She has over 150 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 6000 times and she has an h-index of 39. She has received numerous awards and recognitions. Recently, she received the 2020 Distinguished Service Award of the IEEE ComSoc Technical Committee on Green Communications and Computing. She was also named as N2Women Stars in Computer Networking and Communications in 2019. Dr. Erol-Kantarci has delivered 60+ keynotes, tutorials and panels around the globe and has acted as the general chair and technical program chair for many international conferences and workshops. Her main research interests are AI-enabled wireless networks, 5G and 6G wireless communications, smart grid and Internet of things. She is an IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE Senior member and ACM Senior Member.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Organizing Team
- Principal Research Scientist at Northeastern University
Michele Polese is a Principal Research Scientist at Northeastern University, Boston, since March 2020. He received his Ph.D. at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova in 2020 under the supervision of with Michele Zorzi. He also was an adjunct professor and postdoctoral researcher in 2019/2020 at the University of Padova, and a part-time lecturer in Fall 2020 and 2021 at Northeastern University. During his Ph.D., he visited New York University (NYU), AT&T Labs in Bedminster, NJ, and Northeastern University. He collaborated with several academic and industrial research partners, including Intel, InterDigital, NYU, AT&T Labs, University of Aalborg, King's College and NIST.
He was awarded with several best paper awards, and is serving as TPC co-chair for WNS3 2021-2022 and as an Associate Technical Editor for the IEEE Communications Magazine. His research interests are in the analysis and development of protocols and architectures for future generations of cellular networks (5G and beyond), in particular for millimeter-wave communication, and in the performance evaluation of complex networks.
Job Titles:
- Professor in the Communication Systems Department at EURECOM
Raymond Knopp is currently serving as Professor in the Communication Systems Department at EURECOM. He received his PhD degree in Communication Systems from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne. His current research and teaching interests are in Digital Communications, Software Radio Architectures, and implementation aspects of Signal Processing Systems and Real-Time Wireless Networking Protocols. He is a very well-known name in the Wireless Communications community owing to his contributions in both fundamental research and experimental projects. Raymond is also a leading figure in the OpenAirInterface Community and has been instrumental in making open software for Radio Access Network a reality through contributions over two decades. He is one of the very first and one of the most significant contributors to the OpenAirInterface codebase. Raymond was elected as the President of the OSA in December 2018.
Shweta is a Software/Research Engineer and leads the OpenAirInterface 5G software stack development, testing and integration effort at Northeastern University. She has 12 years of industry experience in wireless, networking and network management domains. She has prior experience with companies including Intel and Tech Mahindra where she focused on research and development in WiFi, WiMAX and LTE and contributed several proposals to WiMAX and 3GPP spanning topics including resource allocation, VoIP scheduling, QoS and power management. Shweta also contributed to software development for products like Intel Wireless Displays and network management/OSS software for large telecom companies. Shweta holds 13 patents and has 4 IEEE publications. Shweta received her Master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rutgers University.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Organizing Team
Job Titles:
- Member of the Organizing Team
Vijay is an Assistant Professor in the Cybersecurity Engineering (CYSE) Department at George Mason University (GMU), Virginia, USA. He holds Adjunct faculty position with the ECE department at Virginia Tech, and is a faculty member of Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI), a Virginia state-wide initiative to foster 5G wireless, autonomous systems, data and cybersecurity research. His research interests include 5G/Next-G wireless, Secure O-RAN architecture, AI/ML for communications, and wireless testbed development and prototyping. He has been PI/Co-PI on more than a dozen of federal, state and industry sponsored research projects, including, NSF, DoD, ARL, CCI and AT&T labs. He has served as a co-chair of the ACM workshop on AI, Blockchain for Smart Cities with 6G (6G-ABS) co-located with ACM MobiCom 2021 and TPC member of several ACM and IEEE conferences.