Distinguished Expert Panel

Network Softwarization in the Era of Complexity

The IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft) has a long-standing tradition of hosting a Distinguished Expert Panel (DEP) at the end of the three main conference days. The DEP offers the audience the possibility to hear the opinions and visions of renowned experts coming from academia, industry, and government agencies on the most relevant aspects of network softwarization, as well as to actively interact with them.

The NetSoft 2023 conference theme (Boosting Future Networks through Advanced Softwarization) reflects the vision of networks characterized by unprecedented levels of complexity, which can be dealt with only through the flexibility, reliability, efficiency, and abstraction capabilities offered by network softwarization and its advanced architectures, frameworks, and models. How to approach such complexity from a perspective that has practical implications on industry and society, taking advantage of the pervasiveness of communications and their evolution toward intelligent paradigms, will be discussed in the NetSoft 2023 DEP, scheduled on Thursday, June 22.

The panel will be centered on the topic “Network Softwarization in the Era of Complexity,” and the discussion will continue on two interesting subtopics: “Industrialization of Network Softwarization” and “Network Softwarization: Pervasiveness and Intelligence.” Champions from industry and academia will present their views and introduce the challenges, stimulating the participation of the other panelists as well as the audience.

Panelists

Rui L. Aguiar, IT Aveiro, Portugal
Javier Antich Romaguera, Selector AI, Spain
Jose Castillo Lema, Red Hat, Spain
Abhimanyu Gosain, Northeastern University, USA
Ricard Vilalta, CTTC, Spain

Biographies

Rui L. Aguiar (born 1967) is currently a Full Professor at University of Aveiro. He is currently coordinating a research line in Instituto de Telecomunicações, on the area of Networks and Services. He has been serving as Steering Board Chair of Networld Europe, the European ETP representing the telecommunications community, engaged in the discussions of the future European R&D workprogrames for telecommunications. He has previously been associated with Carnegie Mellon University, the Universidade de Uberlandia, and has been an advisory for the portuguese Secretaria de Estado das Comunicações and member of the task force for 5G cybersecurity. He is a Chartered Engineer, a Senior Member of IEEE, and a member of ACM. He is a regular keynote speaker in the future of mobile communications and digital society, with dozens of talks across the whole world. He is an associated editor of Wiley’s Emerging Telecommunication Technologies and Springers’ Wireless Networks. He has more than 500 papers published.

Javier Antich has been in the Networking Industry for 25 years. He holds a BS Degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the ETSIT at the Polytechnic University in Valencia, Executive MBA at the IE Business School, and Data Science and Deep Learning master’s degree from the Madrid Institute of IoT. Javier is an accomplished author of the best-selling book “Machine Learning for Network and Cloud Engineers”. He is currently Product Manager at Selector Software. Previously, he was responsible for Nokia NSP long-term product strategy and product management lead for the NSP Platform, Mediation, and Automation frameworks. Before joining Nokia, Javier was Sr. Director PLM in the Automated WAN Solutions team at Juniper, focused on Automation, Programmability, Telemetry & Analytics. Before that, he witnessed the rise of the Carrier/Metro Ethernet market at Riverstone Networks as Principal Systems Engineer.

Jose Castillo Lema is currently working as a Software Engineer in the Telco 5G Performance & Scale team at Red Hat. He has transitioned through Cloud Consultant and Architect roles for NFV-related projects in the past years. BE in Computer Engineering from University of A Coruña (Spain) and PhD from Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo (Brazil). During his MsC and PhD studies, Jose has worked on QoS routing in SDN and NFV Management and Orchestration. He has been designing and implementing IaaS/PaaS solutions, namely OpenStack and Kubernetes/OpenShift, for the last 10 years, and teaching postgraduate courses for the last 7 years.

Abhimanyu (Manu) Gosain is a Senior Director for Institute of Wireless Internet of Things at Northeastern University ,co-Chair for the FCC 6G Technology Advisory Council, member of O-RAN alliance NextG research council, ATIS NextG Alliance, and Senior Advisor for NTIA and DoD OUSD R&E. He is in charge of setting strategic goals and the research agenda for a $100M public-private partnership for the NSF Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program and $25M DARPA Colosseum program. He serves as a Board Member for the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance, Founding member for Magma Core Foundation, University representative for O-RAN Alliance, Telecom Infra Project, NextG Alliance and co-chair on organizing committee and program committees for 6GSymposium, EuCNC,IEEE InfoCom and ACM WinTech. His numerous professional publications and experience exemplify use-inspired basic research in the field of networking technologies such as 5G,6G, AI/ML, edge computing and Internet of Things. He is an IEEE Senior Member. He received his M.S. degree from Tufts University and M.B.A. from Boston University with High Honors.

Ricard Vilalta is Research Director at Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC). His research is focused on Packet Optical Networks and Services. He has contributed with leading positions to more than 20 european, national, regional and industry founded research projects. He is project coordinator of H2020 TeraFlow. Since 2022, he is chair of ETSI TeraFlowSDN.