Speaker’s Bios & Abstracts


Bhaskar Ramamurthi

Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi got his B.Tech in Electronics from IIT Madras in 1980, and his M.S. and Ph.D is Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, in 1982 and 1985 respectively. After working at AT&T Bell Laboratories for a couple of years, he joined the faculty of IIT Madras, his alma mater, in 1986.  He took over as Director, IIT Madras in September 2011. 

His areas of specialisation are Communications and Signal Processing. His research work is in Wireless Networks, Modulation, Wireless Data, and Audio and Video Compression. He is currently also honorary Director of the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology, a public-private initiative at the IIT-M Research Park to make India a wireless technology leader.  He is currently the Chairman of Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI).

He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).  He was awarded the Vasvik Award for Electronic Sciences and Technology for the year 2000, the Tamil Nadu Scientist Award for Engineering and Technology for the year 2003, India Semiconductor Association TechnoVisionary Award for the year 2011, Doyens of Madras Award for the year 2014,ACCS–CDAC Foundation Award for the year 2015 and RWTH Honorary Fellow Award for the year 2020.


Matti Latva-aho

Matti Latva-aho received the M.Sc., Lic.Tech. and Dr. Tech (Hons.) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Oulu, Finland in 1992, 1996 and 1998, respectively. From 1992 to 1993, he was a Research Engineer at Nokia Mobile Phones, Oulu, Finland after which he joined Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC) at the University of Oulu. Prof. Latva-aho was Director of CWC during the years 1998-2006 and Head of Department for Communication Engineering until August 2014. Currently he serves as Academy of Finland Professor in 2017 – 2022 and is Director for National 6G Flagship Programme for 2018 – 2026. His research interests are related to mobile broadband communication systems and currently his group focuses on beyond 5G systems research. Prof. Latva-aho has published close to 500 conference or journal papers in the field of wireless communications. He received Nokia Foundation Award in 2015 for his achievements in mobile communications research.

As 5G is being commercialized, the research community must focus on solutions for 2030 era. To start with, we need new KPI drivers towards 6G besides the current 5G technical superiority KPIs: global megatrends, UN sustainability goals besides new promising technical enablers are emerging critical drivers towards 2030 solutions. Global coverage with services scaling, super efficient short range connectivity and accurate localization are missing features within current mobile systems and deserve special attention. Value chains are likely to be revolutionized via emergence of different verticals needs as well as local spectrum licensing. Ownership of spectrum, network infrastructure as well as customers will need tobe rethought for different use scenarios and future needs. Customized private/local networks is an emerging trend which needs to be supported in future regulation decisions.


Daewon Lee

Daewon Lee is a Principle Engineer in Intel. He has been with Intel since 2016, primarily working on 3GPP physical layer standards and currently is leading research efforts in wireless system design for high carrier frequencies beyond 60 GHz. Prior to Intel, he had 10 years of experience in R&D of wireless communication system and worked on physical layer design of all major wireless communication systems, including 4G LTE, 5G NR, 802.11ac, and 802.11ax, of the modern era. He has received his Electrical Engineering B.S. and M.S. degree from Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and Ph.D. degree from Georgia Institute of Technology. Daewon has contributed 600+ technical contributions to 3GPP and IEEE standards, and holds 478+ US granted patents with 400+ more pending patent applications.

With the tens of GHz spectrum available in bands above 52.6 GHz, it provides unique opportunities to support use cases that require even higher throughput, higher capacity, lower latency, and higher timing accuracy, than what 5G can currently offer. The bands above 52.6 GHz also provide significant design and implementation challenges that stem from use of higher carrier frequencies and wider bandwidths. This presentation will go over some of the potential bands available for above 52.6 GHz, some outstanding characteristics and considerations for system operations, and interesting use cases for above 52.6 GHz.


Sachin Katti

Sachin Katti is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and an Advisor in charge of Telco Strategy at VMware. He is also the Co-Chair of the Technical Steering Committee for O-RAN Alliance and the Director of the xRAN Foundation. He is also Co-Founder and ex-CEO of Uhana (now part of VMware) which built a a network AI platform to monitor and optimize mobile networks and applications. He has previously co-founded Kumu Networks, which is commercializing breakthrough research from his lab on full duplex radios. He received his PhD in EECS from MIT in 2009. His research focuses on designing and building next generation high capacity wireless networks by combining techniques from information and coding theory, RF systems, and networking.  His research has won numerous awards, including the 2008 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award – Honorable Mention, the George Sprowls Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation in EECS at MIT, the IEEE William Bennett Prize, the Best Student Paper Award at ACM SIGCOMM 2012, USENIX ATC 2013, the Sloan Fellowship, the NSF Career Award as well as Okawa, Hooover, Packard and Terman Faculty Fellowships.

— 

Sachin Katti,
Associate Professor, Stanford University,

http://stanford.edu/~skatti

Since cellular networks have been deployed, the radio access network (RAN) has been a vertically integrated and closed part of the network. This has limited network agility, increased cost, hindered innovation and has led to vendor consolidation. Over the past few years, for the first time ever, this has begun to change. We founded the xRAN forum out of our research on cellular network virtualization in 2016 which has now evolved to the O-RAN alliance that is defining the open RAN architecture. Open RAN has quickly become a movement that has been embraced both by cellular network operators and regulators as a means to diversify the cellular infrastructure supply chain and introduce much needed innovation. I will discuss the genesis of this architecture, initial successes with the deployment of the Rakuten and Dish networks in Japan and the US, and the road ahead.


Manish Gangey

Head – Network R&D, Airtel

At Airtel, Manish is responsible for bringing disruptive technologies and products to Airtel’s networks. He is driving initiatives around open network and standardization ecosystem. In his previous roles at Jio, Tejas Networks and Synopsys, he lead product engineering, business development, sales and supply chain operations in various capacities. He co-founded Elina Networks, a promising start up with visionary products to address enterprise and branch office network infrastructure, connectivity and management needs. Manish has thorough understanding of Indian technology market, policies and their impact on businesses.

Traditionally, telecom has remained a closed ecosystem and been ruled by a very small set of companies from around the world. At TSDSI, as part of our larger objective of creating a vibrant and innovative open telecom ecosystem, we want to encourage and nurture a self-sustainable platform for the startups and Indian companies to bring in the innovations while accessing the pie of telecom business. This approach of building the solutions allows customizations along with the adoption of the local innovations, which in turn translates in catering to the need of the end customers. Open-source ecosystem accelerates this approach and provides opportunity to the developers/startups to build solutions with ease and efficiency. It enables the disaggregated system and allows smaller companies to focus on a particular area while remaining relevant. Most popular open source projects are developed with a variety of use cases in mind with contributions coming from people from various backgrounds. This is a proven approach in other verticals in the industry. 5G is likely to become mainstream in next few years, we feel that this is the right time to build open ecosystem and drive standardization process based on learnings coming from such an initiative.


Gilad Garon

Gilad co-founded ASOCS in 2003 and has been spearheading the company as Chief Executive Officer ever since. Bringing with him extensive knowledge in mobile and telecommunications, he holds over 25 years of hands-on experience in international sales, marketing and product management. Driven by his passion for disruptive technologies and the re-definition of existing markets, Gilad steered ASOCS towards its focus on cellular virtualization and mobile edge clouds. 

Gilad holds several patents in the areas of signal processing and communications, and holds an M.B.A. in Marketing and Information Systems and a B.A. in Economics & Business, both from Hebrew University in Jerusalem.


Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey completed his PhD in computing science at the University of Glasgow, funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. In general, his research was focused on distributed systems, specifically, parallel computing and runtime adaptation.

Dr Harvey was previously a JSPS Fellow at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan, working on self-adaptive systems for heterogeneous devices and applying formal methods. Prior to this, he researched high performance computing for the European Union, curriculum development for the Scottish government, and engaged research collaborations with international partners.

Dr Harvey is currently research lead in the Autonomous Networking Research and Innovation Department, Rakuten Mobile Inc. He is researching evolutionary-driven autonomous networks, edge computing, and coordinating international research collaborations.

Autonomous networks are seen as a vehicle to address many of the issues currently being faced by the telecommunications industry: increasing service diversity and demand as well as unprecedented numbers of connected devices. But who is driving? 

Intent-based networking has been proposed as driver, whereby high-level business policy is converted into low-level network actions automatically, however, such a process requires pre-configured mappings and a priori knowledge, limiting the ability for the ‘driver’ to autonomously respond to unknown terrain or drive different types of car. 

In this talk I will discuss an alternate bottom-up approach, whereby the autonomous network itself can achieve human-specified intent without the need for mappings, as well as different necessary standardisations that will be required to operate such a ‘driver’.

 


Pushpak Bhattacharya

Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya is the former Director of IIT Patna (2015-20) and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Department IIT Bombay where he also held the Vijay and Sita Vashi Chair Professorship. Prof. Bhattacharyya’s research areas are Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and AI (NLP-ML-AI). 

Prof. Bhattacharyya has published more than 350 research papers in various areas of NLP. Author of the text book ‘Machine Translation’ Prof. Bhattacharyya has shed light on all paradigms of machine translation with abundant examples from Indian Languages. Two recent monographs by him called ‘Investigations in Computational Sarcasm’ (with Dr. Aditya Joshi) and ‘Cognitively Inspired Natural Language Processing- An Investigation Based on Eye Tracking’ (with Dr. Abhijit Mishra) describe cutting edge research in NLP and ML.

Prof. Bhattacharyya is Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering (FNAE) (elected 2015). For sustained contribution to technology he received the Manthan Award of Ministry of IT (2009), P.K. Patwardhan Award of IIT Bombay (2008) and VNMM Award of IIT Roorkey (2014). He is also Distinguished Alumnus Awardee (2018) of IIT Kharagpur. Recently, he has been selected as prestigious Abdul Kalam National Fellow for his outstanding contributions in the field of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence as well as contribution in the growth of engineering profession in the country. Very recently he has been appointed by Reserve Bank of India as member of Governing Council of Centre of Advance Financial Research and Learning.

The present talk will discuss recent advancement in AI-ML with focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially Indian Language NLP. It will trace some of the historical developments like the advent of Machine Learning based NLP, the marriage of linguistics and probability, the arrival of deep learning to NLP and so on. NLP in low resource settings (small amount of data) is particularly relevant in current times as also is the need for explainability, i.e., deciphering the decision of a large neural network. The talk will keep touching upon methodologies and results in novel and highly challenging NLP problems like sarcasm detection, polite chatbot, zero-shot machine translation and multimodal emotion analysis.

 


Kalpesh Parikh

Dr Kalpesh Parikh has 38 years of IT Experience.

He believes and often says “As Individual I am ZERO, if you place me at right place will increase your value TEN Times”.  And Goal of his life is “I want do something Today, which can trivialize, What I have done till Yesterday” 

He is in Business of

(1) Fulfilling Expectations as a Service

(2) Realizing Aspirations as a Service

(3) Creating Knowledge Product, evolving own self continuously as relevant knowledge Product & Enabling Others to deliver Knowledge Product of their vision.

(4) Creating Human Knowledge Product by Calibrating Competency and threshing Work Culture Calamities

(5) Embedding Knowledge and Logic in Technology – Think Tech-KNOW-Logic-ally

(6) Perfection, Excellence is Just Tolerated

(7) Separating White and Black out of Grey

(8) Detailing, which is normally over looked and ignored by others


Saidhiraj Amuru

Dr Saidhiraj is a researcher interested in design and analysis of wireless communication systems. Currently, he is Principal Engineer with WiSig Networks at IIT Hyderabad, leading the system design of 4G and 5G systems. Also, he is an Adjunct Assistant Professor, at IIT Hyderabad, where he teaches courses related to Machine Learning and Wireless Communications and leads the physical layer system design, algorithms design and research of 5G Testbed project. He represents IITH in TSDSI, ITU and 3GPP meetings. He is one of the core contributors for the TSDSI 5G standard accepted in ITU as an IMT 2020 standard. He was awarded the Exemplary Reviewer award for 2019 IEEE Wireless Communications Letters journal and won the Best Paper Award (Honorable Mention) at COMSNETS 2020.

Previously, he was a 3GPP RAN1 delegate representing Samsung R & D, India and involved in 3GPP 5G NR standardization activities, making significant contributions to NR specifications for initial access, random access, frame structure, bandwidth part and beam management. This work led to several standard accepted patents and he was declared the IP Creator for the year 2017. Prior to his Ph.D he was a modem engineer with Qualcomm working on RF drivers and was given several Qualstar awards for excellent performance across various projects.

 


Subhas Mondal

Subhas is a Wipro Fellow and the Chief Architect of the organization-wide 5G initiative at Wipro. He has over 28+ years of engineering experience in Telecom Research & Development. He is responsible for driving standards contribution, academic collaboration, innovation partnership with technology partners, open source contribution and solution building in 5G. He is a passionate technologist and has developed a variety of solutions & frameworks in emerging technology areas such as 5G, SDN/NFV, Li-Fi, Cyber Security and AI for Network Automation.


Jose Marcos Camara Brito

José Marcos C. Brito received the B. S. degree in electronic and telecommunications engineering from National Institute of Telecommunications (Inatel), Brasil, in 1986 and the M. Sc. and Ph.D.  degrees from Campinas University (Unicamp), Brasil, in 1998 and 2003, respectively, both in electrical engineering.

He has worked as a professor at Inatel since 1986, since 1990 as a full professor. He has occupied several management positions at Inatel: General Manager of Research & Development Center, Post-Graduation Coordinator, Research & Post-Graduation Director, and General Vice-Director.

Currently, he is the Research & Post-Graduation Director at Inatel, the General Coordinator of Radiocommunication Reference Center at Inatel, the Secretary General of 5G Brazil Project at Telebrasil, the Coordinator of the courses Master’s and Doctorate in Telecommunications at Inatel, and the General Coordinator of Brazil 6G Project .

His research & development interests include 5G and 6G networks, telecommunications systems, digital communications, and performance analysis of telecommunications networks.

5G for Remote Areas, besides Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (uRLLC) and Massive MTC (mMTC), could thus become the 4th pillar of IMT-2020, as presented by India in its TSDSI RIT accepted specification by ITU-R, as proposed by Brazil in its 5G-RANGE Project between 5G Brasil and EU, and as promoted by OFCOM in UK with 5G RuralFirst and 5G Rural Integrated Testbed programmes.


Jaspreet Singh

Director and Founder

Kirat Communications Private Limited

Jaspreet Singh is B.Tech from KUK University & Masters in Technology from Jaypee University of Information Technology (JUIT) Shimla, India in the field of Electronics and Communication Engineering with Wireless Communication as his research area.

He has worked under Mr. B M Baveja, Scientist ‘G’ for 6 months in 2013 in the Department of Electronics and Information and Technology (DeitY). After that, he had joined Infonet Lab under Prof Abhay Karandikar, Electrical Engineering Department of IIT Bombay, India in 2014. He had worked in the Cost Optimization in Cellular Networks and patented the Data Acquisition System technology. He has worked around 5 years in the field of affordable rural broadband technologies which include use of TV-UHF Band, 5.8 GHz Band, Terragraph technology for providing connectivity solutions in the rural areas.

In Sep 2016 he started a Private Limited Company called Kirat Communications (OPC) Private Limited with an aim of providing broadband connectivity in the rural areas. Kirat Communications won several awards for the work done in rural areas under the category of “Best Wi-Fi Startup” by DigiAnalysis in 2018 and “Digital India Initiative” category by Aegis Graham Bell Awards in 2018.


Federico Boccardi

Federico Boccardi is a Principal Technology Advisor in the Ofcom Technology Group, where he leads the emerging technology works. 

He received a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2002 and 2007 respectively, and a master in Strategy and Innovation from the Oxford Saïd Business School in 2014. Before joining Ofcom, he was with Bell Labs (Alcatel-Lucent) from 2006 to 2013 and with Vodafone R&D in 2014. 

He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol and a Fellow of the IET.  


D.K. Agrawal

D.K. Agrawal, Senior  GM (Mobile Network Planning) , BSNL Corporate office ,  an ITS 1991 batch. He is a Sales and Business Development Professional, with innovative strategies designed to create long term customer partnerships and drive teamwork, securing business goals aligned with the customer interests. He has worked for 28 years in leadership positions, building long term customer relationships and effective teams. He has been a part of wide ranging roles related to Sales and Marketing, Network Planning, Corporate Presentations, Project Management, QA, Legal, VAS, ERP, Enterprise Solutions, Regulatory Compliance, etc. 

Presently, he is incharge of Network planning of BSNL Mobile network, business dealings with international and domestic mobile equipment manufacturer. He is a part of technology planning, budgeting, Procurement , roll-out, expansion, up-gradation and back-integration of Mobile network assets and pro-active evaluation, testing and adoption of new technologies, based on Business needs. 

BSNL a government strategic assets, which has helped people connect across all nook and corners of our country from days of telecom revolution and present in the hyper-competitive telecom industry. Mostly so, because during the times of calamities and disasters, accountability lies with the government and hence BSNL is there to extend help and enable people to connect in most of rural areas.


Narendra Nath Gangavarapu

Narendra Nath Gangavarapu, an officer of the Indian Telecommunication Service, is working as Joint Secretary, National Security Council Secretariat with responsibilities for coordination in matters of cyber security activities by different entities of India in the government, public and private sectors. Prior to this he was Deputy Director General, Department of Telecommunications, Government of India with overall responsibilities for the policy formulation and implementation and matters pertaining to Telecom network security of India. 

He has over 30 years of telecom including 20 years of senior management experience in the areas of Telecom Security, Network planning, installation, operation and maintenance. He was associated with Telecommunications Standards Development Society of India (TSDSI) as member of the GC. He was also a Director on the board of Tata Communications Limited and is currently on the board of NIXI.

He holds a Masters in Technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi with specialization in VLSI design.


Gyu Myoung Lee

Gyu Myoung Lee is a reader in the department of Computer Science, Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). He is also with KAIST Institute for IT convergence, Daejeon, Rep. of Korea, as Adjunct Professor.

Dr. Lee has been actively participating in standardization meetings including ITU-T SG 13 and SG20, IETF and oneM2M, etc., and currently serves as a Working Party chair and the Rapporteur of Q16/13 and Q4/20 in ITU-T. He is also the chair of ITU-T Focus Group on Data Processing and Management (FG-DPM) to support IoT and smart cities & communities. 

He has contributed more than 400 proposals for standards and published more than 160 papers in academic journals and conferences. He received several Best Paper Awards in international and domestic conferences and served as a reviewer of IEEE journals/conference papers and an organizer/member of committee of international conferences. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

This talk presents the overall trend of international standardization on the quantum key distribution networks and reviews the recommendations developed by ITU-T SG13.

First, it introduces the standardization categories and the status of major standard documents in progress in major standardization organizations (ITU-T SG13, SG17, FG-QIT4N, ETSI, etc.) in charge of standardization of QKD technology. Next, a detailed introduction to the recommendations made in ITU-T SG13 is provided. Lastly, it introduces new standardization items related to Quantum Enhanced Networks, which we intend to focus on in the new ITU-T study period starting from next year, and discusses future standardization directions.


Satish Jamadagni

20 years of industry experience in the telecom domain. Currently working as a Vice President and head of standards in Reliance Jio.  Current Vice Chair of TSDSI, Chair of TSDSI SG-Networks. Former Co-Chair of the Asia Regional Operators Group; Small Cell Forum (SCF), Previously on the board of the International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium (IMTC). Over 120 granted patents in the wireless domain.


Sachin Lodha

Dr Sachin Lodha is a Principal Scientist at TCS’ Corporate Technology Office. He leads Cybersecurity research and innovation efforts within the organization and has a special interest in privacy related topics. His efforts on that front have led to multiple research papers, patent applications, and award-winning innovations that are now available as TCS products. 

He graduated with B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1996 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, in 2002. Since then he is with TCS Innovation Lab TRDDC in Pune. 

Dr Lodha was TCS’s principal investigator for the TCS-Stanford collaboration on data privacy. He is an ACM India Eminent Speaker and a winner of TCS Distinguished Scientist Award.

Trust is essential for society to function and progress. If data is the new crude of today’s digital world, then it is of utmost importance that it is managed in a trustworthy manner. Otherwise, its potential to benefit society and businesses will remain untapped.

In this talk, we will discuss trust issues surrounding data in general – and personal data in particular – against the backdrop of trends like AI, Cloud, IoT, Social and Mobility. We will also briefly describe some state-of-the-art research and emerging technologies that can help in mitigating diverse trust issues and provide assurance to all the stakeholders.


Balaji Rangaswamy

Balaji Rangaswamy is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sooktha, a Bengaluru based cellular wireless solution provider. Balaji has 24 years of experience in the Telecom and Cellular Wireless Industry. He has a deep knowledge of 3GPP cellular wireless technologies and specifications. He engaged with most global telecom companies in different capacities before he bootstrapped Sooktha and over the last decade built it to a global 4G/5G solutions provider. Within TSDSI he leads special interest groups focused on privacy, personal data protection, and proximity processing.

Proximity detection, processing, and contact tracing have become one of the cornerstones of managing the Covid-19 pandemic. This will continue to be important even as countries around the world gradually attempt to restore normalcy and also administer vaccines as and when they are available. Preserving privacy while ensuring effective contact tracing has been a challenge faced by most solutions for contact tracing and in most countries around the Globe. The panel will discuss how privacy can be preserved or protected while ensuring that the efficacy of tracing is not reduced.


Parag Naik

Parag is a technology serial entrepreneur with over 27 years of industry experience, out of which 19 years have been in indigenous deep technology startups. He is the Co-founder and CEO at Saankhya. He is a named inventor on 40+ international patents. Most recently he was chosen in the list of “50 promising entrepreneurs in India “for the year 2020.


Puneet Agarwal

Puneet Agarwal is one of the founding members of VVDN Technologies, an electronics engineering and manufacturing company founded in 2007 which provides end-to-end product design, development and manufacturing services in areas of 5GNetworking & Wi-Fi, Vision, IoT, Cloud and Apps.

At VVDN, Puneet has been responsible for driving the end-to-end strategy and managing the R& D, go-to-market strategy execution and competitive/client analysis. Also oversee global customer sales and support.

He is passionate about Job Creations in India (B.Tech, Diploma, ITI) and driving India to be the next Electronic Hub of the world.


Lalit Mohan

Lalit Mohan Sanagavarapu is a Senior Domain Expert at IDRBT and has 20+ years of Banking Technology experience. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of India’s first 5G Use Cases Lab. He played a key role in set-up of Indian Banking Community Cloud and Indian Bank’ Centre for Analysis of Risks and Threats. He executed projects for Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (an organization established by Reserve Bank of India), Wells Fargo, World Bank, Marsh Canada, Aetna, Goldman Sachs, World Bank, etc. He has 40+ research and white papers  in Software Engineering, Search Engine, Education and Banking Technologies.


Babu Narayanan

Babu Narayanan is Chief Technologist at the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology, a research society of IIT Madras. He has nearly three decades of experience in ICT industry working on research and development of Telecom and Real-time systems. After completing Masters from IIT Kanpur, he handled key assignments in the product and services industry before joining CEWiT in 2009. Through CEWiT, he helps in indigenous development of advanced wireless solutions for various markets in India. He is one of the main architects of the 5G Test Bed program where an end to end 5G Test Bed is being developed by CEWiT along with seven Institutes and several industry partners. He has been an active member of TSDSI and was the Vice-chair from 2016 to 2018.

5G networks are expected to be transformational in nature. The revolutionary features that they bring to the telecom world make several use cases and applications possible, which were not feasible or even imagined earlier. Diverse services that are required of disparate use cases can be delivered from a single flexible network. In order to experience these new use cases and applications using 5G networks, there is a strong need to have Use case labs or Test beds. The panel session on 5G Use Cases and Test Labs Initiatives will focus on some of the unique and interesting use cases of 5G networks and discuss how  the various Test Lab initiatives in the country and elsewhere can be leveraged to validate and show case them.


Arumugam Govindswamy

Arumugam Govindswamy is the President & CEO of MBit Wireless Inc. He has over 30 years of engineering and management experience in wireless communications and has emerged as a technology leader and entrepreneur. Arumugam founded MBit Wireless with a vision to make it a global leader in the wireless technology industry. MBit Wireless is a fabless semiconductor system solutions company offering 4G/5G mobile broadband and device-to-cloud with edge computing IoT solutions. Prior to MBit Wireless, Arumugam held various engineering and management positions at ISRO, Ericsson, Rockwell International, Conexant Systems and Skyworks Solutions. He is a named inventor in 39 patents. He holds a MS from Southern Illinois University, and a BE from University of Madras.


Akshay Mishra

I am the Founder and CTO at DSPWorks, where we work on Electronics and IoT, in Mumbai.
I did my Bachelors from MSU Baroda and M.Tech from IITB.
I have worked with Emuzed, HP Labs, Tejas Networks before DSPWorks.
I made the first thin client in India on an ARM9 in 2007 to stream from Tata Walky to TV – a successful technical design which could never see the light of the market. Ever since there have been embedded and communications product.
As DSPWorks we started by making Radio over IP, an radio + telephony + Satellite communication soft-switch which extends the range of your regular VHF/ UHF handheld and also the life of your conventional radio infrastructure. The solution is deployed and covering over 300k sq kms of India for a unified access.

Electronics System Design, Embedded Signal Processing and Low Power communications are the areas of interest. I am a, now dormant, Amateur Radio Operator with the call sign VU2BUG.

Contact Tracing has to be privacy preserving, efficient and should cover everyone irrespective of their device OS or battery status. With this intent we got on to develop an open-sourced initiative of enabling contact tracing which can interoperate with any device. Technically we have a device which does this and the results are encouraging.


Abhijit Chaudhary

Abhijit has around 2 decades of experience working in Product Management, Engineering and Innovation for the Telecommunication and Data Networking industry. He had previously Co-founded Etrance Networks and was instrumental in architecting Networking Virtualization, Deep Packet Inspection and Routing products for Mobile Operators, Cloud Providers and Enterprises. He was part of the initial engineering team of Apigee that got acquired by Google and had previously worked with Cisco, Huawei and Motorola as an Architect and Senior Engineering roles.


Kumar Sivarajan

Dr Kumar Sivarajan is the Chief Technology Officer at Tejas Networks and was also the Former Chairman of TSDSI. He has nearly three decades of experience in the field of telecommunications.

Prior to joining Tejas, he was an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York.

Kumar holds a B. Tech in Electrical Engineering (Electronics) from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras and an M.S and PhD from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA (Caltech).

In India’s drive for self-reliance, or atmanirbharta, the discussion has largely centered around manufacturing. However, for knowledge-driven industries such as telecom, hardware design and carrier-grade software are far more valuable than manufacturing and needs to be emphasized accordingly. The leading example of course is Apple’s iPhone and iOS, for which the hardware design and software development are done in California, but the phone is assembled in China, or now, in India. In this panel, we will hear from India’s leading telecom startups on their efforts to build an AtmaNirbhar Bharat through design and development in India for deployment world-wide.


Dong Ku Kim

DONG KU KIM received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1992. He worked on CDMA systems in the cellular infrastructure group of Motorola at Fort Worth, Texas. He has been a professor at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Yonsei University, since 1994. He is a founding chair of the 5G Forum in 2013 and is a member of the 5G+ strategy committee chaired by the minister of MIST. He received the Order of Service Merit from the Korean government in 2020, for the contribution of the world’s first commercialization of 5G, ecosystem creation, and the 5G defusion. He is a recipient of the Dr. Irwin Jacobs Academic Achievement Award in 2016, working on 5G system and V2X technologies using lens-based MIMO.


Andreas Mueller

Dr. Andreas Mueller is the Head of Communication and Network Technology in the Corporate Research Department of Robert Bosch GmbH in Stuttgart, Germany. In addition to that, he is coordinating the Industrial 5G activities of Bosch across the different business units. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of the “5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation” (5G-ACIA), which has been established for driving, shaping and promoting Industrial 5G worldwide. This is done by providing a global forum for discussing related technical, regulatory and business aspects and by bringing all relevant stakeholders together.

Prior to joining Bosch, Andreas was a Research Staff Member at the Institute of Telecommunications of the University of Stuttgart, Germany, where he was contributing to the further development of the 3GPP Long Term Evolution towards LTE-Advanced. Besides, he was working as a Systems Engineer for Rohde & Schwarz, developing a novel software-defined radio based communication system for the German Armed Forces. Andreas holds a German Diploma degree as well as a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering (with distinction) and an M.Sc. degree in Information Technology, all from the University of Stuttgart, Germany.


Abhishek Thakur

Abhishek Thakur has executed multiple global projects for both product and services-based IT organizations. After graduation from IIT-Roorkee (1997) he started his professional career with Wipro (Global R&D) before joining Synchronous Inc. a startup in RF and optical communication. Post-acquisition of Synchronous by Motorola he lead the systems team for home connectivity products. He also worked at Microsoft in mobile and virtualization products before joining BITS Pilani. For the last couple of years, he is with IDRBT as Assitant Professor.He works on open source technologies, fintech collaboration and 5G use cases lab for banking and financial services. His research interests include multimedia communications, financial inclusion and information and communication technologies for rural deployments

Besides providing an overview of the 5G Use Cases Lab activities, we have a glimpse at likely products and solutions that will reduce friction for multiple financial services scenarios. Besides new age technologies like AR/VR/MR, IoT, Blockchain, massive video analytics and network slicing, it also focusses on additional security and privacy related challenges that the banking and financial services demand. Ability to leverage shared infrastructure for efficient delivery on ATM enabled services and financial inclusion are explored as likely solutions for people who are at the bulk / base of the pyramid.


Akhilesh C. Srivastava

Providing leadership by driving IPR & Standards for strategic innovations under Corporate Research & Innovation (Corp. R&I) Organization of TCS. Present Chairman (since August 2017) of the Study Group for Services and Solutions (SGSS) at Telecommunications Standards Development Society of India (TSDSI), the Indian Standards Developing Organization (SDO) focusing on ICT standards for 5G and IOT technologies.

36 Years of industry and teaching experience comprising of ICT standards, IPR Policy, Software IP protection, Patent management, Invention Mining, Technology Landscape and IP Portfolio Strategy, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based speech, script and natural language technologies, Engineering Education and Research, Team building, Students’ counseling. 

Education:

M.S. (Systems & Information) from BITS Pilani (Rajasthan), M.Sc. (Physics with Electronics and Instrumentation) from Pantnagar University at Nainital. 

Work experience:

Presently work as Senior Consultant in Corporate R&I Organization of TCS [with Tata Group for almost 20 years]. Worked as Vice President – Products in Yantra Software, a technology and IP focused software company; Delivery Head for Voice and Healthcare unit at Satyam Computer Services Ltd.; Vice Principal and EE Faculty at RAIT Navi Mumbai under University of Mumbai; and EEE Faculty at BITS Pilani. 

Present Research interest:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled Bhagavad-Gita for solving human challenges.


Gnanapriya Chidambaranathan

Assistant Vice President, Infosys
GNANAPRIYAC@infosys.com

Gnanapriya (Priya) is Associate Vice President, Head of Technology & Architecture Practice – Communications, Media & Entertainment, Energy, Utilities & Services Business Unit (ECS).

Priya has 27+ years of experience in Telecom & IT. She contributes to unit strategy, drives technology adoption for business solutions across varied programs globally.

She has been driving Digital, Micro Services, Cloud migration, Open Source Adoption, 5G / Edge, emerging technologies like Blockchain solutions, Legacy Modernization, Data Modernization, Innovation, guiding varied transformation & modernization programs for ECS global clients and part of org level core team.

She recently got ‘Outstanding Achievement’ Award under Disruptor category of “Global Women in Telco & Tech” Awards for 2020

Under her guidance & drive, Infosys has won 10 Outstanding Catalyst Team Awards in TM Forum since 2016, she  received Individual Recognition Award @ Industry TM Forum, serving as TMF Collaboration Sub-committee member, Execom member of IEEE Communication Society, Bangalore Chapter. She is a speaker in multiple Industry and Technology Forums. She has co-authored book on Digital Signal Processing I, II editions published by McGraw Hill, International edition and translated to Mandarin.


Pawan Garg

Mr. Pawan Garg is former Wireless Adviser to the Government of India, which is Head of national spectrum management organization, in Ministry of Communications, New Delhi. He was internationally elected Member* of the Radio Regulations Board (RRB) of International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Geneva from 2006 to 2014. ITU is the specialized body of UN system for ICT issues. He was elected as Chairman of the Board for 2013.

3This specialized ITU Board resolves various issues concerning implementation of ITU Radio Regulations, which is an international treaty for planning and use of RF spectrum & satellites globally; as well as resolution of disputes among countries, if any, regarding use of radio spectrum or interference in its usage. 

He is an alumnus of PEC, Chandigarh and has 50 years of experience in spectrum management and planning of various radiocommunication services – both terrestrial as well satellite based services. During his term as Wireless Adviser to Govt. of India from 2002 to 2008, exponential growth of mobile services took place in India and it achieved the critical mass for further growth to bring phone services within the reach of common man as well as give India the second largest subscriber base globally. 

Widely traveled since 1980, he has represented India on the Governing Council of ITU and chaired / spoken at large number of national and international conferences in his field, besides publishing many papers on related issues.

*http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/RRB/Pages/Composition.aspx


Ashutosh Pandey

Ashutosh Pandey is from Indian Telecom Service 1986 Batch. He has more than 30 years of experience in various domains of Telecom. Currently he is responsible for Standardization in Radio and Satellite products.
He is one of the Vice Chairs of ITU Study Goup-5. He is an active contributor in Working Party 5D of Study Group 5 of ITU-R.
In APT also , he is actively involved in preparation to WTSA 2021 and is the Vice chair of Woking Group 1.


K.V.S Hari

K V S Hari is a Professor in the Department of ECE, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He holds a BE (ECE) degree from Osmania University, Hyderabad, MTech (Radar and Communication Systems) from IIT Delhi and PhD (Systems Science) from U C San Diego and has been a visiting faculty at Stanford University and Affiliate Professor at KTH- Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. His research interests include 5G wireless communications, radar systems, autonomous vehicles, neuroscience, and affordable MRI systems. He is a co-author of the IEEE 802.16 standard on wireless channel models. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of IEEE. More details at http://ece.iisc.ac.in/~hari


Tommy Svensson

TOMMY SVENSSON is Full Professor in Communication Systems at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, leading Wireless Systems research on air interface and networking technologies for access, backhaul/ fronthaul in 5G and Beyond/ 6G mobile communications. He received a Ph.D. in Information theory from Chalmers in 2003, has worked at Ericsson AB with core networks, radio access networks, and microwave transmission products, and has been deeply involved in European research towards 4G and 5G system concepts. His research interests include design and analysis of physical layer algorithms, multiple access, resource allocation, cooperative MIMO systems, C-V2X, and satellite networks. He has co-authored 5 books, 89 journal papers, 127 conference papers and 53 public EU projects deliverables. He has been editor of IEEE TWC, WCL, and is founding editorial board member and editor of IEEE JSAC Series on Machine Learning in Communications and Networks.


Anand Virani

Anand Virani is the Founder and CEO at Cutting Chai Technologies, a Wireless deep-tech company developing leading-edge Technology and Solutions that redefine Communication between People, Content and Businesses in an Online-Offline (or O2O) world.
Prior to CCT, Anand led the Reference Design and Software Partner Ecosystem businesses at Qualcomm that he grew to $100M in value to Qualcomm’s OEM and ISV partners globally.
Anand is a Mobile industry veteran with over two decades of leadership experience with Engineering, Product Management and Business Development roles at Qualcomm, Tata Teleservices, Juniper Networks, Motorola across the US and India.

User Data Privacy and Protection is a highly relevant ‘Digital Era’ topic that is at the top-of-mind of Industry and Regulators alike and is being intensely discussed and debated today by stakeholders across the Digital content ‘supply chain’, with implications ranging from financial frauds and service disruptions to national security.
But what about the average user or the ‘Digital’ consumer that owns this Data? How aware is the consumer of Privacy and Protection violation issues that affect his personal and/or sensitive Data, and further how does this user maintain visibility and control on who, where and why is his Data being used or in today’s context, being abused?
This talk attempts to answer these questions and introduces a Technological framework for Industry and Regulators, to align behind solving for the consumer and his Data privacy and protection needs.


Sandeep Agrawal

Sandeep Agrawal is working as a TEAM LEADER at C-DOT Bangalore. He joined C-DOT in 2008 after passing out from NIT Bhopal. He is responsible for overall Wi-Fi & Unlicensed band product development strategy in his present role in C-DOT.
Sandeep is actively involved in the standardisation of Wi-Fi & Rural Broadband. He is Chair of IEEE SA Rural Communication Industry Connect Program and Chair of P2872 WG to build “Interoperable and Secure Public Wi-Fi Infrastructure and architecture”. He is also Vice Chair of P2061 to build “Architecture for Low mobility Energy Efficient network for Affordable broadband Access”. He is contributing in the IEEE 802.11bc Enhanced broadcast group for Emergency Alert service standardisation. He is also Chair of IoT Work Group and co-lead of Wi-Fi sensing group in WBA (Wireless Broadband Alliance). He is a member of TSDSI-IEEE SA forum and Spectrum sub-committee of 5G HLF.


Raymond Knopp

Prof. Raymond KNOPP received the B.Eng. (Honours) and the M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, in 1992 and 1993, respectively. From 1993-1997 he was a research assistant in the Mobile Communications Department at EURECOM working towards the PhD degree in Communication Systems from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne. From 1997-2000 he was a research associate in the Mobile Communications Laboratory (LCM) of the Communication Systems Department of EPFL. He joined EURECOM as a professor in 2000. His current research and teaching interests are in the area of digital communications, software radio architectures, and implementation aspects of signal processing systems and real-time wireless networking protocols. He is also president of the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance, an academia-industry consortium federating the OpenAirInterface development
communities which promotes open-source tools for 3GPP-based systems.

In this talk we provide an overview of the status of OpenAirInterface5g, a set of open-source code software packages which allow for experimenting with 4G and 5G real-time radio networks using off-the-shelf computing and radio equipment, including both access and core network functions. We will then show how these tools can be used in the context of cloud-native implementations and in particular methods for integrating OpenAirInterface5g with Kubernetes-based computing infrastructure and other open-source components such as ONAP. The talk will include details of deploying an experimental cloud-native infrastructure combining USRPs, high-end Intel-Architecture servers and modern switching fabric. We will also provide some information regarding ongoing experimentation at EURECOM and coordination efforts with other open-architecture initiatives such as O-RAN and TIP.


Debabrata Das

Dr. Debabrata Das is serving as Professor at IIIT Bangalore (IIITB). Before joining IIITB, he had served at G S Sanyal School of Telecommunication at IIT Kharagpur and later at Kirana Networks in New Jersey, USA. Prof. Das is Principal Investigator (PI) of National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical System project in Advanced Communication System by Dept. of Science and Technology, Govt of India. He was PI of multiple sponsored research projects from Intel, Hewlett Packard, Tejas Networks, Microsoft, Motorola Research, Nokia, Cognizant, Govt. of India on areas of Broadband Wireless MAC QoS and IMS. Dr. Das received his Ph.D. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
He has more than 160 research papers in different Transaction/Journals and International Conferences. Dr. Das has received 4 best paper awards. He has 3 US/Indian patents and 11 more are under review. He and his wireless network team had contributed ideas Broadband Wireless Standard. He has received Prof. K. Sreenivasan Memorial Award 2017 for excellent teaching in the areas of Telecommunication from IETE. Dr. Das is recipient of IEEE Region-10 Outstanding Volunteer Award 2020, Global IEEE MGA Achievement Award 2012. He is Fellow-IETE, Fellow-IE and SM-IEEE. He was recipient of Hewlett Packard Endowment Chair Professor in IIITB. He was Chairman of IEEE Bangalore Section 2017. Dr. Das is a Technical/Steering/Empower Committee member of multiple Departments of Government of India and Government of Karnataka. Dr. Das was the Dean-Academic and R&D of IIIT Bangalore from 2014-2017.


Yoshinori Ohmura

Mr. Yoshinori Ohmura joined KDD Co. Ltd. (currently KDDI Corporation) in 1981 and was engaged in the applied technology planning and standardization of network in ITU-T and APT etc. and management of mobile phone joint venture in the overseas businesses and mobile application services. He is currently engaged in the promoting to realize the new generation mobile systems in ARIB (Association of Radio Industries and Businesses) from 2011. He also served as Deputy Secretary General of 5GMF (The 5th Generation Mobile Communications Promotion Forum) in Japan from 2015 and he is currently serving as Secretary General from 2019.


Inder Gopal

He is a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, working on behalf of the Government of India’s Smart City Mission to launch a nationwide Urban Data platform. Previously, he has worked as a senior executive at such companies as IBM, Ericsson and AT&T. He has also been an entrepreneur, founding two venture-funded start-up companies. He was founding Chairman of OpenDaylight, an Open Source networking initiative of the Linux Foundation. Dr. Gopal has also had a distinguished research career in the area of computer networks, with 20 patents and more than 70 technical publications to his credit. He is a Fellow of IEEE.

This panel will explore new trends in open networking driven by open source and white boxes and explore how the Indian 5G sector, standards process, innovation and start-up ecosystem will be impacted. Some of the questions we will discuss are:
– Maturity of open source and white-box solutions- Reality or myth?
– Is Open Source the way of achieving consensus and standards for software-centric aspects of carriers?
– What aspects of carriers will be most impacted by open source?
– Is Open Source/White Box way for emerging Indian vendors to compete globally with traditional vendors?
– What do we need to do to make the Indian 5G ecosystem ready? Consortia? Policy? Contributions?


Badri Gomatam

A photonics expert, Dr Badri Gomatam leads core research in optical communications products and network solutions. With a view on emerging network technologies, Badri guides the Company’s technology vision. Under his leadership, the Company today has 376 patents to its credit. Badri has an MS and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a BS from the Birla Institute of Technology. He joined STL in 2011


V. Kamakoti

Veezhinathan Kamakoti is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He specializes in the areas of computer architecture and secure systems engineering. He is a coordinator of the Information Security Education and Awareness program of the Department of Information Technology, Government of India and the Chairman of the Task Force on Artificial Intelligence for India’s Economic Transformation. He is also a member of the National Security Advisory Board.
Prof. Kamakoti is also the Principal Investigator of the National Indigenous Microprocessor Development program. He has also won several awards such as the IBM Faculty Award (2016) and the Academic Excellence Award (2014) instituted by the DRDO, India.


Tharek Abd Rahman

Prof. Dr. Tharek Abd Rahman is Advisor IMT and Future Networks working group in MTSFB.
Prof Dr. Tharek plays a key role in developing 5G Malaysia initiatives. He connects the academia and the industry, forming effective collaborations and partnerships. This includes the engagements with Japan’s 5G Mobile Communications Promotion Forum (5G MF) and Korea’s 5G Forum, which promotes knowledge transfer and the collaboration in 5G research and development.
Prof. Dr. Tharek is currently serving the School of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). He is conducting researches related to mobile communications, antenna, and propagation. Prior to this, he conducted various short courses on mobile and satellite communication for the telecommunications industry and government agencies.
Prof. Dr. Tharek has published over 300 scientific papers and journals whereby his ideas won national and international recognition. He is an active member of several research academic entities and has been appointed as Fellow of Academy Science Malaysia.
He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom; a Master’s Degree in Communication Engineering from UMIST, Manchester, United Kingdom; and a PhD in Mobile Communication from the University of Bristol, United Kingdom.


Ravikanth Pasumarthy

RaviKanth has around 25 years of experience in Wireless and Satellite based systems and is currently working as Vice-President (Technology) at Altran.
Ravi has experience in successful conceptualization, architecture, design to delivery of Wireless Solutions. His area of expertise involves Solution engineering, System architecture and realization for 4G/5G systems
Ravi represents Altran in O-RAN and is also driving the Open RAN initiatives at Altran. He is also active speaker speaking on 5G and related topics in various workshops/conferences.


Kishore Babu GSC Yerraballa

Mr. Kishore Babu, firmly believes in the competencies of Indian innovation systems and entrepreneurial abilities of start-ups and SMEs in cutting edge technologies given an opportunity, right partnerships and a little fillip. In line with Indian ethos of ‘Vasudhaika kutumbakam’ (world is one family), he is a strong supporter of collaboration among the stakeholders across the borders to address the issues of global digital divide and the accomplish the objectives of WSIS and SDGs. In his current role, he facilitates engagement with Indian ‘Digital Communication Technology’ companies in the domains of standardization, R&D, innovation to drive the Government of India’s policy objectives.
Previously, Mr. Kishore Babu contributed in the ‘Policy’ and ‘International Relations’ domains of the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India. He contributed and facilitated National Digital Communications Policy (2018) and espoused spectrum reforms leading to delicensing of 5GHz Wi-fi spectrum and license exempt bands for Short Range Devices and Ultrawideband devices. He orchestrated the department’s unified spectrum licensing framework for Experimentation, R&D, Technology Trials, Manufacturing, Demo licenses to facilitate innovation in wireless R&D with minimum transaction cost in obtaining spectrum.
He actively contributes and also represents the Department of Telecommunications in the following positions at International Telecommunication Union (ITU), UN Special Agency for ICTs:
– Vice Chair, Telecommunications Development Advisory Group (TDAG) of ITU (International Telecommunications Union) from Asia-Pacific Region
– Vice Chair Council Working Group (CWG) Internet, ITU
Previous Positions of contribution in ITU and APT
– Chair, Working Group on Policy, Legal – APT (Asia Pacific Telecommunity) Preparatory Process for ITU PP Conference 2018
– Vice Chair, APT Preparatory process for WTDC-17
– Chair, Drafting Group for Study Group Questions WTDC 2017


R K Pathak

Shri R. K. Pathak has done his B.E. Hons. (Electrical) and M Tech (Power Electronics). He has more than 33 years of experience in different disciplines including entrepreneurship, standardization and promotion, development of manufacturing of telecom equipment and investment promotions.
He is nodal officer for implementation of 5G technology. Presently he is Deputy Director General (International Cooperation) in Department of Telecom and looking after work related to WTO, economic cooperation agreements, standardization, promotion of telecom exports and Telecom Centre of Excellences, India (TCOE India). He has additional responsibility as Secretary, TEPC and also Director, TCOE India.


David Lund

David Lund is President of Public Safety Communications Europe (PSCE) and Coordinator of BroadWay. BroadWay is a key activity that will jointly procure pre-commercial solutions to enable mobile broadband for public safety practitioners, providing them with operational mobility; allowing the ability to carry out their important lifesaving and crime fighting roles, wherever they are in Europe, and whenever they need to. David represents PSCE as Market Representation Partner of 3GPP and is also contributing to a special task force on 5G standardisation for vertical industries. David’s research background focuses on a leading-edge capability in Cyber Security and Resilient Communications, which are the core fundamental factors key to achieving Trustworthy Communication.


U. K. Srivastava

Mr. U. K. Srivastava is heading Telecom Engineering Centre as Senior Deputy Director General. TEC is the national standards body for the telecommunication sector in India. It is also entrusted with the responsibility of testing and certification of telecom products.
Prior to joining TEC, he worked for four and half years as Principal Advisor in Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, looking after telecom networks, spectrum and licensing. He was responsible for recommendation to the government on the issues of spectrum management, licensing issues of access, national long distance, International Long Distance, Machine to Machine Communications, Broadband, Satellite Communications, Internet Telephony etc. He is also responsible for laying down regulations for network interconnection, Interconnection User Charge, Mobile Number Portability, charges for Cable Landing Stations etc.
He is a graduate in Electronics Engineering and possesses Diploma in Management and has 35 years of experience in telecommunications sector.
He belongs to the 1983 batch of Indian Telecom Service and is trained in transmission technologies, including optical, radio and satellite communications. He has managed various telecom activities including operations, maintenance, training, quality assurance, standardization and policy. He has been a member of various standing committees on satellite communications.
He was deputed to ITU to serve in Iraq for two years and at ITU HQ in Geneva for a year and half.
He has chaired the National Working Group-5 of ITU-T for a period of six years and has convened National Working Group-5 of ITU-R for eight years. He has also been actively involved in spectrum related issues and contributed in National Preparatory Committee (NPC) meetings and finalization of National Frequency Allocation Plan (NFAP)-2011.


Salih Ergut

Dr. Salih Ergüt has more than 15 years of experience in the telecommunication domain in academia and industry. He has worked for vendor and operator companies in the sector including Ericsson Wireless (San Diego, CA), Ericsson Silicon Valley, Aware (Boston, MA), Nextwave (San Diego, CA), Turk Telekom Group (Istanbul, Turkey), and is currently working at Turkcell 5G R&D team in Istanbul, Turkey. He also served as Vice-chairman at ITU-T Focus Group on “Machine Learning for Future Networks including 5G”.
Dr. Ergüt received his BS in Electrical Engineering from Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey), MS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Northeastern University (Boston, MA), and PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of California San Diego (La Jolla, CA).
His current research interests include 5G technologies, machine learning for communication networks, big data technologies, and network slicing.


M P S Alawa

He joined initially at Wireless Monitoring Organization (WMO) in October 1997, and he worked there for more than 15 years. WMO is an eye and ear of WPC Wing, play important role in Radio-frequency management.
He worked in Wireless Monitoring Station to monitor Radio-frequency assignments, to resolve wireless interference, inspection of wireless installations etc. During the 15 years in WMO, he worked at various levels.
From 2015 onward he is working in WPC Wing. WPC Wing issues various types of frequency assignments and gives wireless operating license with technical conditions.
For some period he was also involved to study WRC-19 resolutions taking into account the interest of Indian stakeholders, and helping in finalizing the Indian position in different WRC-19 resolution.
Currently he is heading Planning-Group in WPC Wing, where assignments below 806 MHz are issued.


Kiran Kuchi

Dr. Kiran Kuchi, a professor at IIT Hyderabad, is a globally recognized innovator in the realm of 5G standards development. He has introduced the culture of developing wireless Standards Related Patents in India through his leadership role at Telecom Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI) and has contributed towards the creation of several important technologies in the 5G standards. Dr.
Kuchi has invented & co-invented over 100 patents in the 4G/5G technology, of which more than 50 patents have resulted from his work carried out in India.


Vinod Khader

Vinod Khader has over 20 years experience in Software Development and is an Associate Director at IBM Software Labs in the Data and AI division.
In the current role, he leads the development of Watson Machine Learning Platform on IBM’s public and private cloud platforms and also leads the Data and AI teams in the IBM India labs.
Watson Machine Learning platform help Data Scientists, Data Engineers and App Developers in managing the end to end Machine Learning and Model management life cycle including from Model Training, Evaluation and Serving. He has extensive experience in software product and application development and has been working with customers across the globe over the last 2 decades.


Amit Pradhan

Amit Pradhan is the Executive Vice President (Technology Security), the Chief Privacy Officer & Chief Technology Security Officer at Vi (one of the largest telecom company in APAC). He holds one of the largest security portfolios in the country which includes Telecom Security, IT Security, Data privacy and protection and Enterprise security. With close to two decades of experience, he has spent most of his time in the areas of security strategy, transformation projects, security operations and advisory role.
His specializes in security strategy and cyber incident response & forensics. He is recognized in the industry for his security initiatives and as security strategist. He frequently speaks at domestic and international forums on security. He has been recognized and awarded for his contribution to the security fraternity by various industry forum.


Brejesh Lal

He completed PhD in 1997 from IIT Delhi in the area of Multirate Signal Processing. He joined Hughes Software Systems in September 1997 and worked there for nearly 8 years in the Signal Processing group. He worked on Source Coding and PHY layer solutions for many communication technologies such as terrestrial wireless, GEO and LEO Satellite communication systems, Satellite broadband and others.
He returned to his alma mater and joined IIT Delhi as a faculty member in 2005. Since July 2005 He has been in the Electrical Engineering Department and has contributed to research & teaching in the general area of Signal Processing. He has graduated 13 PhD students during that period, further 6 have submitted their synopsis. Besides, them 29 research scholars are pursuing PhD under his supervision. He has successfully completed numerous sponsored projects and consultancies and is working on several others. The total number is close to 47 and the total budget outlay in excess of Rs. 70 crores.
The areas in which he has been publishing and doing sponsored research are centered on signal processing. The areas include, object representation, tracking and classification, odometry, depth map generation, representation and rendering. He is also exploring vector sensor based underwater acoustic communications, and performance issues in molecular communications.
He is the fromer head of Bharti School of Telcom Technology and Management, and the co-ordinator of two centers of excellence, viz. Airtel IIT Delhi Centre of Excellence in Telecommunications and Ericsson IIT Delhi 5G Center of Excellence. He is the incharge of an IoT laboratory that He set up in collaboration with Samsung.
He has mentored 5 startups, in the areas of Virtualization, Geo-fencing, UAV based solutions and recommendation and data mining. He actively participate in building and deploying technology. He have also served as expert in numerous government and private agencies in aspects related to signal processing.


Sharad Arora

Founder & Managing Director, Sensorise Digital Services
Gautam Buddha Nagar, Uttar Pradesh, India

Sharad is a telecom industry professional who has played a key role as a telecom operator twice, having first set up green field IT and Network operations for a GSM operator, and then in the launch of the 3G business with a portfolio of enterprise and lifestyle products such as a mobile wallet, surveillance, school bus tracking, security etc for a challenger Telco brand. He has played an entrepreneurial role in setting up the SmartTrust entity and a competent team in India and Asia Pacific region, taking the Products and Services to market leadership, including setting up of Certification Authority systems for India. He has spent his initial days in research and product development at an office automation major. He has been a technology evangelist and an entrepreneur from his early days.
Sharad has made a significant contribution to the development of several ecosystems in India, including but not limited to mobile telephony, digital certificates, SIM browsers, mobile wallets, embedded SIMs, Metering/ SCADA connectivity and public service vehicle security.
He has continuously supported the standardisation and policy initiatives for Telecoms, IT, Transport and Urban Development. He has authored / edited in excess of six Technical Reports, two ITU contributions and several TSDSI initiatives other than being an active member of three TEC National Working Groups, BIS Sectoral Committee on IoT, Niti Aayog Telematics Committee, TSDSI Roadmap and Outreach Committee.
Sharad is a visionary thinker with a global perspective, leadership abilities, technical skills, learnability, focus and perseverance for successful orchestration of complex and large scale “idea to execution” programs.
In founding Sensorise, Sharad has pioneered a new business model for IoT/M2M Service Providers in India, introduced factory ready connectivity to the country and enabled a new ecosystem with “quality of service” enablement for mission critical machine to machine services. Sensorise has won many awards and accolades including the 2019 Global Stevie Bronze Award for “End to End Connectivity Service Provider for Machine Critical Use Case (IoT/M2M)”.


V. Chandrashekhar

A Global IT executive with a proven track record of more than 29 years in managing challenging business environments. A strong Executive with a demonstrated ability to develop C-suite relationships and operating in both start-up and stable market environment. An executive with a proven ability to turnaround operations successfully in a very short span of time, his strength lies in his dynamism and ability to motivate large groups of people and galvanize them towards the organization’s goals.
Over the years, he has the distinction of working in various roles–staff and line, multiple geographies–US, Europe, APAC, Middle East, South Africa, Japan, ANZ, India, multiple functions–technology, sales, delivery, verticals(BFSI, Manufacturing- both process and discrete, Media and Entertainment, Hi Tech, Public Sector, Health Care), running operations – domestic, global and partnerships with MNC’s, Joint ventures, across multiple Service Lines (Application Development and Maintenance, Product Implementation, Data Analytics and Business Intelligence, Remote Infrastructure Management, Cloud Services, Quality Management Services, Consulting), developing Horizon 2 and Horizon 3 strategy, spearheading Quality initiatives in multiple regions, spearheading growth in both service and product domains. He is an acknowledged thought leader in the areas of emerging technologies and business models and speaks at various forums
He has also been involved in the spheres of education and better policy making and the adaptation of technology in these important social spheres. An immense believer in the core values of business ethics, he is well known in the industry for his strength of conviction in these ideals and as an upholder of organizational ethics.


Adrian Scrase

Adrian Scrase is CTO within ETSI with operational responsibility for all of ETSI’s standards production activities. He has more than 30 years experience in the telecommunications field, which includes 25 years of experience in standardization.
He played a central role in the creation of the “3rd Generation Partnership Project” (3GPP) and is responsible for the operations of the 3GPP Project Co-ordination Group. He heads 3GPPs’ Mobile Competence Centre (MCC) which is an International team of 20 experts who provide comprehensive support to the Project.
He was also principally involved in the formation of the “oneM2M” Partnership Project and oversees ETSI’s support to that initiative.

5G has been specifically designed to meet the needs of industry sectors by delivering ultra-reliable and low latency communications. This has stimulated much interest from industry sectors who are attracted to use this technology. However, many of those sectors, for example the finance and health sectors, do not just demand ultra-performance but also ultra-security. This short presentation will examine what is being done to address this security demand at a standardization level and what extra measures are required to ensure the confidence of end customers.


Giridhar D. Mandyam

Dr. Giridhar D. (Giri) Mandyam is the Chief Security Architect for all IoT products that Qualcomm produces. He has also worked at Rockwell International, Texas Instruments and Nokia. He is currently the Chair of the IoT Working Group in the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance. He was Chair of the S34-3 Ad Hoc Group on Presentation Logic and Service Frameworks for the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) and was a key contributor in development of the ATSC 3.0 specification. Moreover he was Qualcomm’s Advisory Committee representative to the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), he has served as Chair of the W3C Geolocation Working Group. Dr. Mandyam is inventor or co-inventor of more than 50 issued US patents, and was recognized in 2017 by Qualcomm with the IP Achievement Award. He has also published over 80 conference and journal papers, and 5 book chapters. He is a co-author of the text Third-Generation CDMA Systems for Enhanced Data Services (Academic Press, 2002). He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and has been a member of the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.


Jean-Pierre Bienaimé

Jean-Pierre Bienaimé has been Chairman of Ubiquity Consulting, with consulting activities in the field of telecommunications, digital and international relations, since 2016. He has also been Senior Advisor International Relations at Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI) since May 2020. He has been Secretary General of the 5G Infrastructure Association (5G-IA), representing the digital & telecommunications industry (operators, manufacturers, research and academic institutes, verticals, SMEs) in the Public-Private Partnership (5G PPP) with the European Commission (DG CNECT), from April 2016 until April 2019. He has also been Chairman of the 5G PPP Steering Board.
Jean-Pierre has been Chairman of IREST (Economic and Social Research Institute on Telecommunications), a think tank of influence based in Paris, from 2015 until September 2020.
Jean-Pierre has been Chairman of mobile industry association The UMTS Forum from 2003 until 2015, with a mission to promote a common vision of the development of 3G UMTS and 4G LTE and evolutions, and to ensure their worldwide commercial success.
Joining France Telecom (FT) in 1979, Bienaimé has had responsibilities including Director Planning Department at FT, Advisor to the Director General of Moroccan Telecommunications in Rabat, Director of Marketing and Product Development for International Networks & Services at FT, Chief Executive Officer of Nexus International, and Vice-President Group Mobile Support at Orange. From 2010 until 2016, Jean-Pierre has been Senior Vice-President at Orange Wholesale.
Jean-Pierre is graduated from ESSEC Business School (Master in Management), from Sciences-Po Paris, from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Postes & Télécommunications – Paris (MS), and from INSEAD Executive MBA.


Vishwakumara Kayargadde

Vishwakumara is a technology entrepreneur with over three decades of industry and research experience. Currently he is Chief Operating Officer at Saankhya Labs, a communication IC and Systems company, he co-founded. Prior to Saankhya he was CEO and co-founder of Smart Yantra, one of India’s first video streaming IP companies. Smart Yantra was acquired by Genesis Microchip in 2004. Earlier he was employed with Genesis Microchip, Philips Consumer Electronics and Philips Research Labs at various product management and R&D management roles. Vishwa has co-authored several publications in leading International Journals and co-inventor in 8 granted US patents.


Nitin Jain

Nitin Jain is Vice President – 5G Sales at VVDN Technologies. Nitin is an expert in Market and Business analytics, E2E solution management, Bid management, Design proposal and Pre-sales activities. Prior to joining VVDN in 2018, Nitin worked with some of the biggest names in the Telecom industry such as ZTE Telecom India, Huawei, Ericsson and Tata.
At VVDN, Nitin focuses on various 5G related solutions for clients, including R&D, engineering, design, development, IPR creation, and manufacturing. He envisions VVDN to deliver a complete “Make in India” strategy, and creating an eco-system of ‘Atmanirbhar’ India in 5G solutions engineering and manufacturing.
An alumni of IMT Ghaziabad, Nitin has over 16 years of experience in the Telcom and Sales industry. An Engineer by education, Nitin possess a diverse set of Business skills including Strategy, Marketing, Sales, Team Building and Business Development.