Panel – Applications of AI to Telecommunications; AI approaches, Data, and Research

Dr. Adam T. Drobot is a technologist with over forty years of experience in industry, the public sector, and in research. Today his activities include strategic consulting, start-ups, and participation in industry associations and government advisory bodies. He is the Chairman of the Board of OpenTechWorks, Inc. a company specializing in open source software. Previously he was the Managing Director and CTO of 2M Companies in Dallas, TX, from 2010-2012, and President of the Applied Research and Government Business Units at Telcordia Technologies and the company’s CTO from 2002 to 2010. Prior to that, Adam managed the Advanced Technology Group at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He also served as the Senior Vice President for Science and Technology as part of his 27 years of service at SAIC from 1975 to 2002. He has published more than 100 journal articles, and is a frequent contributor to industry literature. He currently holds 26 patents. Adam is a member of Several Corporate Boards, and the FCC Technology Advisory Council. He is on the Board of the Telecommunications Industry Association where he has Chaired the TIA Technology Committee. He is the 2007 recipient of IEEE’s Managerial Excellence Award. For the IEEE he has Chaired IEEE Employee Benefits and Compensation Committee, the IEEE Awards Recognition Council, served as a member of the IEEE Awards Board.

Anne Y. Lee is a Bell Labs Fellow currently working on the Bell Labs CTO Technology Strategy and Architecture supporting the CTO and CEO by analyzing the evolution of key technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence) and the overall network architecture to identify new directions for the industry and the impact and requirements on the company’s portfolio. Prior to this, Anne was the CTO of IMS Innovations. In this role, she initiated and drove next-generation IP communications solutions such as WebRTC as well as worked on creating the vision and initiating the work for future IP communications. She has also previously worked in both the Wireless CTO and Wireline CTO organizations. Anne has over 30 years of experience at Nokia (AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia) with more than 17 years in Wireless research and development. Anne is the original IMS technical team leader for Lucent Technologies working closely with the standards team from the beginning – circa 1999 – to pioneer the multi-access, globally interoperable IP communications system being deployed worldwide in the industry today. This year is the 20thanniversary of IMS with over a billion devices deployed. Anne is the recipient of the 2014 WebRTC Pioneer Award, the 2010 Alcatel-Lucent Asian American Award for “Innovation and Technical Excellence”, and the 2005 Lucent Chairman’s Award for “Creating IMS Leadership”.

Nageen Himayat is a Principal Engineer with Intel, where she conducts research on next generation (5G/5G+) of mobile broadband systems, and applications of machine learning for wireless. She has authored over 250 technical publications (peer-reviewed publications, 3GPP/IEEE standards contributions and patent filings), with contributions on multi-radio heterogeneous networks, mm-wave communication, cross layer design, and non-linear signal processing techniques. Prior to Intel, Nageen was with Lucent Technologies and General Instrument, where she developed systems for both wireline and wireless networks. Nageen received her BSEE degree from Rice University, MBA from University of California, Berkeley, and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Sujata Banerjee is a Sr. Director of Research at VMware. Her expertise is in topics related to software defined networking and network functions virtualization, and she is broadly interested in network automation and performance. Prior to joining VMware, she was a distinguished technologist and research director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs, leading a network systems research group which conducted research on enterprise, service provider and datacenter networks. Prior to her industrial research career, she also held a tenured Associate Professor position at the University of Pittsburgh. She is serving as the technical program co-chair of the ACM SIGCOMM 2020 conference. She served as the technical co-chair of the 2018 USENIX NSDI and the 2017 ACM Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR) conferences and the general chair of ACM HotNets 2017. She has been on the technical program committees of several conferences such as ACM SIGCOMM, ACM CoNEXT, ACM HotNets, USENIX NSDI, IEEE ICNP and IEEE Infocom. . She received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California (USC) and the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in Electrical Engineering. She holds 37 US patents and is a recipient of the U.S.