Panel Discussions

Dr. C. Mohan is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in China, a Member of the inaugural Board of Governors of Digital University Kerala, and an Advisor of the Kerala Blockchain Academy (KBA) and the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA) in India. He retired in June 2020 from being an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center in Silicon Valley. He was an IBM researcher for 38.5 years in the database, blockchain, AI and related areas, impacting numerous IBM and non-IBM products, the research and academic communities, and standards, especially with his invention of the well-known ARIES family of database locking and recovery algorithms, and the Presumed Abort distributed commit protocol. This IBM (1997-2020), ACM (2002) and IEEE (2002) Fellow has also served as the IBM India Chief Scientist (2006-2009). In addition to receiving the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award (1996), the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award (1999) and numerous IBM awards, Mohan was elected to the US and Indian National Academies of Engineering (2009) and named an IBM Master Inventor (1997). This Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras (1977) received his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin (1981). He is an inventor of 50 patents. During the last many years, he focused on Blockchain, AI, Big Data and HTAP technologies (http://bit.ly/sigBcP, http://bit.ly/CMgMDS). Since 2017, he has been an evangelist of permissioned blockchains and the myth buster of permissionless blockchains. During 1H2021, Mohan was the Shaw Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore where he taught a seminar course on distributed data and computing. In late 2019, he became an Honorary Advisor to TNeGA for its blockchain and other projects. In August 2020, he joined the Advisory Board of KBA of India. Since 2016, Mohan has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor of China’s prestigious Tsinghua University. In September 2021, he was inducted as a member of the inaugural Board of Governors of the new Indian university Digital University Kerala. He has served on the advisory board of IEEE Spectrum, and on numerous conference and journal boards. He has also been a Consultant to the Microsoft Data Team. Mohan is a frequent speaker in North America, Europe and Asia. He has given talks in 43 countries. He is highly active on social media and has a huge network of followers. More information can be found in the Wikipedia page at http://bit.ly/CMwIkP and his resume at http://bit.ly/CMoNUS

Hari Balakrishnan is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science at MIT. His research is in networked computer systems, with current interests in networking, sensing, and perception for sensor-equipped mobile devices connected to cloud or edge services running in datacenters. He has made many contributions to mobile and sensor computing, overlay and peer-to-peer networks, congestion control, Internet routing, and data management systems.

In 2010, based on the CarTel project, Balakrishnan co-founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT). CMT's mission is to make the world's roads and drivers safer. Using mobile sensing and IoT, signal processing, machine learning, and behavioral science, CMT's platform measures driving behavior to improve driving behavior and reduce risk, provides crash alerts and roadside assistance, and creates a smooth connected claims process. Today, CMT is the world's leading telematics and analytics provider, serving millions of users in 20 countries by partnering with insurers (including powering telematics programs at 20 of the top 25 US insurers), rideshares, automotive manufacturers, and mobile network operators.

Balakrishnan received his PhD in 1998 from the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, which named him a Distinguished Alumnus in 2021, and a BTech in Computer Science in 1993 from IIT Madras, which named him a Distinguished Alumnus in 2013. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2015) and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017). His honors include the ACM SIGCOMM Award for lifetime contributions to communication networks (2021), the IEEE Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award (2021), the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the New England region (2021), the Infosys Prize for Engineering and Computer Science (2020), Fellow of the IEEE (2020), Fellow of the ACM (2008), Sloan Fellow (2002), and the ACM doctoral dissertation award for Computer Science (1998). He has received several best-paper awards including six test-of-time awards for papers with long-term impact and the IEEE Bennett paper prize (2004). At MIT, he has received several honors including the Harold E. Edgerton faculty achievement award for research, teaching, and service (2003), the HKN best instructor award (2018), the Jamieson teaching award (2012), the Junior Bose teaching award (2002), and the Spira teaching award (2001). He has advised ~25 PhD students and 10 postdocs, who have made their mark in resarch and industry at leading universities and companies.

Balakrishnan was an advisor to Meraki from its inception in 2006 to its acquisition by Cisco in 2012. In 2003, Balakrishnan co-founded StreamBase Systems (acquired by TIBCO), the first high-performance commercial stream processing (aka complex event processing) engine. Between 2000 and 2003, he helped devise the key network QoS algorithms for Sandburst (acquired by Broadcom).

Rooji Jinan is a 5th year PhD student at Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-physical systems, IISc, Bangalore. She works under the guidance of Dr. Parimal Parag, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, IISc. Prior to joining IISc, she worked as an Assistant Professor at Christ College of Engineering, affiliated to Kalam Technological University, Kerala. Her current research focusses on achieving low latency in distributed storage and compute systems. She is also a recipient of the Cisco-Centre for Networked Intelligence PhD Fellowship for the years 2019, 2021 and the RBCCPS PhD fellowship for the year 2020.

Ish Jain is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of California San Diego and holds a Master's degree from New York University and a bachelor's degree from IIT Kanpur, India. He is affiliated with the wireless communication and sensing lab at UC San Diego, advised by Prof. Dinesh Bharadia. Ish is passionate about new technology in 5G wireless communication, autonomous vehicles, and virtual reality. Recently, he has built a 28 GHz millimeter-wave testbed using phased arrays and demonstrated a robust and high-speed multi-beam link in practical scenarios. Ish has served as TPC of Mobicom student workshop S3, IEEE WCNC, and CoNext Artifact Evaluation Committee. He is also serving as Scholar in Residence at the Marconi Society. He publishes in top networking conferences such as Sigcomm, NSDI, Mobicom, and IEEE Journals.

Subodh is responsible for innovating across architectures in delivering solutions to meet the customer outcomes. Subodh designs SP IoT Enterprise, DC & Security solutions, with laser focus on Automation and Simplification. He is passionate on creating intellectual capital that can be scaled and leveraged across teams and externally for customers / partners.

Key responsibilities
Designing and implementing programmable networks for global customers of Cisco

Core domains
SDN/NFV, IoT, Mobility (3G to 5G transformation), Zero Trust Security, Virtualization, DC automation, Cloud and ML frameworks.

He has implemented secure solutions for mass scale architectures for clients (to name a few) – ATT, T-Mobile, Verizon, Rakuten, Jio, VodaIdea, Airtel, PLDT, Walmart, Amazon, JPMC, Citibank, HSBC, HDFC, NSE, SBI, Toyota, L&T, Wipro, Infosys.

Subodh is passionate on creating intellectual capital that can be scaled and leveraged across internal team inside Cisco and externally for customers.

Subodh is currently focussed on designing incubating Cisco AI, 5G and IoT industry solutions – in Digital Manufacturing, Smart Cities, Health care, Education, Energy and Transportation. He works as mentor for grooming future Technical leaders/Architects in Cisco. He contributes to incubating 5 start-ups

Dorothy Stanley is an HPE Fellow and head of standards strategy at Aruba, A Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company. She currently serves as Chair of the IEEE 802.11 Working Group. She has chaired several task groups in the 802.11 Working Group and has served in numerous leadership roles in Wi-Fi Alliance.

Previous to joining Aruba Networks in 2005, Stanley was a Consulting Member of the Technical Staff at Agere Systems for Wavelan products and a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Lucent Technologies and AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Among Dorothy’s awards are 5 patents, a Wi-Fi Alliance Members Achievement Award, and numerous IEEE Standards Association awards.

Ashutosh Dutta is currently Chief 5G Strategist and JHU/APL Sabbatical Fellow at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Labs (JHU/APL), USA. He also serves as Chair for Electrical and Computer Engineering for Engineering Professional Program at JHU. His career, spanning more than 30 years, includes Director of Technology Security and Lead Member of Technical Staff at AT&T, CTO of Wireless at a Cybersecurity company NIKSUN, Inc., Senior Scientist in Telcordia Research, Director of Central Research Facility at Columbia University, adjunct faculty at NJIT, and Computer Engineer with TATA Motors. Ashutosh is author of more than 100 technical papers and 31 issued patents. Ashutosh is co-author of the book, titled, “Mobility Protocols and Handover Optimization: Design, Evaluation and Application” published by IEEE and John & Wiley. As a Technical Leader in 5G and security, Ashutosh has been serving as the founding Co-Chair for the IEEE Future Networks Initiative that focuses on 5G standardization, education, publications, testbed, and roadmap activities. Ashutosh is IEEE Communications Society's Distinguished Lecturer for 2017-2020 and as an ACM Distinguished Speaker (2020-2022). Ashutosh currently serves as the founding co-chair for IEEE Future Networks Initiative and Member-At-Large for IEEE Communications Society. He co-founded the IEEE STEM conference (ISEC) and helped to implement EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) projects in several high schools. Ashutosh has served as the general Co-Chair for the IEEE STEM conference for the last 10 years. Ashutosh served as the Director of Industry Outreach for IEEE Communications Society from 2014-2019. He was recipient of 2009 IEEE MGA Leadership award and 2010 IEEE-USA professional leadership award. Ashutosh currently serves as Member-At-Large for IEEE Communications Society for 2020-2022. Ashutosh has served as the general Co-Chair for the premier IEEE 5G World Forums and has organized 73 5G World Summits around the world. Ashutosh currently serves as the Chair for IEEE Industry Connection’s O-RAN activities.

Ashutosh is a Distinguished Alumnus of NIT Rourkela with BS in Electrical Engineering, MS in Computer Science from NJIT, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University under the supervision of Prof. Henning Schulzrinne. Ashutosh is a Fellow of IEEE and Distinguished member ACM.

VP of Technology Development and 5G Labs
Verizon

Sanyogita Shamsunder is revolutionizing the way new technologies are being developed and deployed across the business and consumer sectors. Her team is responsible for new technology platforms such as augmented reality, computer vision, location and quantum technologies. Sanyogita’s work experience spans all areas of the wireless business, including silicon, network technology development, marketing, planning and strategy for both enterprise and small businesses. Prior to Verizon, she has worked at Bell Labs, startups such as Sandbridge Technologies and Stanford Telecom.

A sought-after speaker, Sanyogita has spoken at many industry conferences, including Mobile World Congress’ Fierce Wireless panels and keynote, CES and various IEEE conferences and workshops. She also actively mentors and advocates for women in technology, participating in Grace Hopper Celebration, Tech Up for Women, Women in XR, SWE and multiple other women in technology conferences. She is on the Board of Industry Leaders of Consumer Technology Association, technical advisory board of Maxilinear, and the non-profit Manavi.
Sanyogita received her MBA from the Wharton School and Ph.D in electrical engineering and math from the University of Virginia. She brings her deep knowledge and experience to all enterprise and technology management and operations.

Hemant is a Senior Member of IEEE and works as a Principal Scientist in TCS Research & Innovation. He has more than 20 years of experience in Academics, Research & Innovation, Standardization and Product Development. Hemant holds MTech and PhD from IIT Bombay and BE from UCE Burla, Sambalpur. He has published many research papers in national /international conferences and journals of repute. Hemant has filed more than 100 patents in various geographies and has more than 50 Patent grants in India and other geographies. Hemant also teaches at IIT Bhubaneswar as an Adjunct Faculty. Hemant has co-authored a book - Miles and Memories, published in Nov 2020.

Victor Bahl is an American computer scientist at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. He is known for his research contributions to white space radio data networks, radio signal-strength based indoor positioning systems, multi-radio wireless systems, wireless network virtualization, and for bringing wireless links into the datacenter. He is also known for his leadership of the mobile computing community as the co-founder of the ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing (SIGMOBILE). He is the founder of international conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services Conference (MobiSys), and the founder of ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review, a quarterly scientific journal that publishes peer-reviewed technical papers, opinion columns, and news stories related to wireless communications and mobility. Bahl has received important awards; delivered dozens of keynotes and plenary talks at conferences and workshops; delivered over six dozen distinguished seminars at universities; written over hundred papers with more than 25,000 citations and awarded over 100 US and international patents. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Bahl is a Technical Fellow and Director of the Mobility & Networking Research group at Microsoft Research.

Dinesh Bharadia is faculty in ECE at University of California San Diego. Dinesh Bharadia received his PhD from Stanford University in 2016 and was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT. Specifically, in his dissertation, he built prototype of a radio, that invalidated a long held assumption in wireless is that radios cannot transmit and receive at the same time on the same frequency. In recognition of his work, Dinesh was named to Forbes 30 under 30 for the science category worldwide list. Dinesh was also named a Marconi Young Scholar for outstanding wireless research and awarded the Michael Dukakis Leadership award. He was also named as one of the top 35 Innovators under 35 in the world by MIT Technology Review in 2016. Dinesh is also recipient of the Sarah and Thomas Kailath Stanford Graduate Fellowship. From 2013 to 2015, he was a Principal Scientist for Kumu Networks, where he worked to commercialize his research on full-duplex radios, building a product that underwent successful field trials at Tier 1 network providers worldwide like Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom. This product is currently under deployment. His research interests include advancing the theory and design of modern wireless communication systems, wireless imaging, sensor networks and data-center networks.
Dinesh received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2010, where he received the gold medal for graduating at the top of his class. His research has been published at top conferences such as SIGCOMM, NSDI, MobiCom and has been cited over 2000 times. He would offer core courses in wireless communication, IoT networks, and networked systems building.
Google Scholar can be located at https://dblp.org/pid/52/10159.html
Publication list at dblp: https://dblp.org/pid/52/10159.html
Wireless Communication, Sensing, and Networking (WCSNG) lab http://wcsng.ucsd.edu/

Sarav Radhakrishnan is an expert in enterprise security and a 22 year Cisco veteran. He drives a number of initiatives and provides the product and technology direction towards securing the enterprise, by combining the power of the network along with security. He is a lead architect working on zero trust and secure access service edge across the products. He also drives security focussed innovations across the highly profitable catalyst switching, routing and wireless portfolio. He was a lead investigator in Cisco’s award winning encrypted traffic analytics. His current research and development interests include enterprise security, wireless, LiFi and machine learning. Sarav has 12 patents to his name.

Distinguished Technologist, Director of Networking and Distributed Systems Lab
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Puneet Sharma is Director of Networking and Distributed Systems Lab and a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs where he leads research on Edge2Cloud Infrastructure for IoT and AI. He received a Ph.D. (CS) from University of Southern California and a B.Tech. from IIT, Delhi. Puneet was named Fellow of IEEE in 2014 for contributions to the design of scalable networking, SDN and energy efficiency in data centers. Puneet has co-authored Internet standards e.g. UPnP’s QoSv3 and IETF multicast routing protocol PIM. He has published close to 100 research articles. His work on Mobile Collaborative Communities was featured in the New Scientist Magazine. He has been granted 30+ US patents.

Guru Parulkar is Executive Director of ONF and ON.Lab, and Executive Director of Stanford Platform Lab, and Consulting Professor of EE at Stanford University.
Guru has been in the field of networking for over 25 years. He joined Stanford in 2007 as Executive Director of its Clean Slate Internet Design Program. At Stanford Guru helped create three programs: OpenFlow / Software-Defined Networking, Programmable Open Mobile Internet 2020, and Stanford Experimental Data Center Laboratory.
Prior to Stanford, Guru spent four years at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and worked with the broader research community to create programs such as GENI, Future Internet Design, and Network of Sensor Systems. Guru received NSF Director’s award for Program Management excellence.
Before NSF Guru founded several startups including Growth Networks (acquired by Cisco) and Sceos (IPO’d as Ruckus Wireless). Guru served as Entrepreneur in Residence at NEA in 2001 and received NEA’s Entrepreneurship Award.
Prior to this Guru spent over 12 years at Washington University in St. Louis where he was a Professor of Computer Science, Director of Applied Research Laboratory and the head of research and prototyping of high performance networking and multimedia systems.
Guru received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Delaware in 1987. Guru is a recipient of the Alumni Outstanding Achievement award and the Frank A. Pehrson Graduate Student Achievement award.

Vamsidhar Valluri is a Distinguished Engineer at PaloAlto Networks focusing on IoT Security. Prior to that he worked for Cisco Systems as a founding member of the team that built Cisco’s intent-based networking solution DNAC. He co-authored the Netflow V9 protocol which later got standardized as the IPFIX protocol by IETF. He holds more than a dozen patents in Network monitoring, Mobility, SD WAN and Network Security. He received a BTech degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from BITS Pilani and MS degree in Computer Science from University Of Missouri Kansas City.

Dr. Debabrata Das is serving as Director of IIIT Bangalore (IIITB). Before joining IIITB in 2002, he had served at G S Sanyal School of Telecommunication at IIT Kharagpur and later at Kirana Networks in New Jersey, USA. He is PI and nodal officer of project under National Mission for Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems in the areas of Advanced Communication System, from DST, Govt of India. He is CoPI of a project from Tejas Networks on network node reliability. He was PI of multiple sponsored projects from Intel, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Motorola Research, Nokia, Govt. of India on the areas of Broadband Wireless MAC/QoS/Energy-saving, IMS. His main areas of research interest are IoT and Wireless Access Network's MAC, QoS, Power saving. Dr. Das received his Ph.D. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.

He has more than 185 peer reviewed papers in different Transaction/Journals and International Conferences. Dr. Das has received 6 best paper awards. He has 3 US/Indian patents and 12 more are under review. He and his wireless network team had contributed ideas to IEEE Wireless Broadband 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 and Outstanding Volunteer Award IEEE Bangalore Section 2008. 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. He is Chair-Elect 2021 IEEE India Council. Dr. Das is a Technical, Steering, Empower Committee member of multiple Departments of Government of India and Government of Karnataka.

Laxmi Mukund is a Principle Engineer at Cisco with a master's in computer science and networking and about 20 years of industry experience. She has worked on various routing, switching and security products across Enterprise, Service Provider and Data Centers. Her main contributions have been in the architecture, design and development of features in the areas of core routing and switching, prefix convergence, Netflow, access control, quality of service, secure policy access and LISP (Locator Identity Separation Protocol). She is currently working on security with privacy as an important component. Understanding customer key requirements and translating them into usable features, reviewing network topology designs and troubleshooting complex customer network topologies has been part of her journey through out. She has a Cisco pioneer award and patents in the area of networking.