Andrew Houghton

Biography: Andrew Houghton is Deputy Head of the Unit "Future Networks", in the Directorate-General for Information Society and Media of the European Commission, in Brussels, Belgium. He received a B.Sc. degree from the University of Sussex, UK, and a Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham, UK. After five years with BT Research Labs, he joined STC /Northern Telecom Optoelectronics, involved in production of components for optical communications systems. In 1992 he joined the European Commission as a Project Officer, initially in the area of optical networks and subsequently in the areas of "Broadband for All" and "Mobile and Wireless Beyond 3G". He is currently responsible for projects of the ICT FP7 Research Programme, in the "Network of the Future" Objective.

Michael Roth

Biography: Michael Roth is Vice President R&D at ADVA AG Optical Networking and as such responsible for the development of Network Management tools, Network Planning tools and Control Plane protocols. Michael leads an international team which develops the control basis for dynamic, carrier grade, optical transport networks. As member of the ADVA Management Team Michael also focuses on research activities in order to evaluate future technology directions. Michael joined ADVA in 2000 through an acquisition of Cellware Broadband where he was leading development projects for ATM access devices. He received a graduate engineering degree in Information Technology from the Technical University in Dresden, Germany.

Dominique Verchere

Biography: Dominique Verchere, received the M.S. degree in Physics, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Sciences from University of Paris VI. Since 1998 he has been with Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France, first designing OmniPCX Enterprise Call Server, then developing on data path processing of terabit-switching capacity systems within Terabit IP Optical Router project. Then, he worked on GMPLS based resilience functions for IP Routers, Optical X-Connects and Carrier Grade Ethernet systems according to the extensions based on RSVP-TE and OSPF-TE. He actively contributed on several European projects including EuroNGI, TBones and NOBEL1 & 2 and external projects such as VIOLA. He is currently working on the Service Management functions oriented Optical Networks based on TeleManagement Forum MTOSI 2.0 and is leading the sub-project on Network Architectures and Protocols for Computing services enabled by Ultra-high Capacity Optical Networks (CARRIOCAS). He has published more than 40 papers and 25 patents. He is Member of Alcatel-Lucent Technical Academy since 2003 and is co-chairing the ALTA French Chapter since 2006.

Stefano Testa

Title: "Cloud computing: The business transformational journey to a world of many clouds"

Biography: Stefano Testa has over 13 years of experience in the networking and IT industry, having covered functions in engineering, product management, marketing and sales at Cisco.

He spent the first 7 years of his career at Cisco's headquarters in San Jose, California, where he specialized in application networking services, an area where he holds 5 US patents. Stefano is currently working for the Cisco sales organization in EMEA, where he is managing a team of consulting systems engineers and solution architects, focusing on data center, cloud computing and intelligent automation technologies. Stefano holds electrical engineering degrees from Politecnico di Torino and Ecole Centrale Paris, and an Executive MBA from IESE business school in Barcelona.

Nicola Ciulli

Biography: Nicola Ciulli is head of R&D activities at Nextworks. He holds a degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Pisa and a Degree Diploma from SSSUP S. Anna. He worked for Consorzio Pisa Ricerche (CPR) in the period 1997-2009, and for the Department of Information Engineering of University of Pisa in 1999, and founded Nextworks in 2002. His main research activities concern the architectural aspects of Control and Management Planes and of Traffic Control in next generation packet networks: Quality of Service (QoS) provision over the Internet and its interworking with Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Differentiated Services (DiffServ), MPLS and their integration. A special focus of his research and industrial activity is on GMPLS control and management planes architectures for SDH, WDM networks and Transport Ethernet services. He participated in several FP5, FP6 and FP7 projects (recent and current ones include PHOSPHORUS, GEYSERS, ETICS, MAINS and CHANGE), in research activities funded by the Italian Ministry for Research and Education (MIUR), and in industrial projects (e.g. Marconi ASTN/GMPLS project, where he coordinated the activities of Nextworks; Alcatel projects on 4G mixed packet/TDM switches and T-MPLS), Ericsson R&D projects on GMPLS and PCE.

Óscar González de Dios

Biography: Óscar González de Dios received the MS from U. of Valladolid in 2000 in Telecommunications Engineering. He is currently pursuing his PhD degree in TCP/IP performance over OBS networks in the University of Valladolid. In 2000 he joined Telefónica Research and Developement, where he worked for several years in the development and testing of telephony applications and interactive voice-response platforms. In 2005 he joined the Advanced Network Planning department in Telefonica Research and Development in Madrid to start working in the analysis and performance evaluation of optical networks. Since then, he has been involved in numerous R&D European projects, (NOBEL, NOBEL II, STRONGEST , ePhoton One+, AGAVE, BONE, BANITS2, RUBENS, ONE). He has co-authored more than 40 research papers in international conferences and magazines. He is currently active in IETF CCAMP, PCE and OPSA WG, as well as ITU-T Study group 15, where he is co-author of several drafts. He is currently a Technology Specialist in the Scalable Multilayer Photonic Network groups and is in charge of the design of the interconnection of photonic Networks in Telefónica. His main research interests include Photonic Networks, Inter-domain Routing, PCE, OBS, automatic network configuration, End To End MPLS and TCP performance.

Prof. Ashwin Gumaste

Biography: Ashwin Gumaste is currently the James R. Isaac Chair and faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. He is currently also a consultant to Nokia Siemens Networks, Munich where he works on optical access standardization efforts. He was a Visiting Scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA in the Research Laboratory for Electronics from 2008 to 2010. He was previously with Fujitsu Laboratories (USA) Inc in the Photonics Networking Laboratory (2001-05). He has also worked in Fujitsu Network Communications R&D (in Richardson TX) and prior to that with Cisco Systems in the Optical Networking Group (ONG). His work on light-trails has been widely referred, deployed and recognized by both industry and academia. His recent work on Omnipresent Ethernet has been adopted by tier-1 service providers and also resulted in the largest ever acquisition between any IIT and the industry. This has led to a family of transport products. Ashwin has 20 granted US patents and over 30 pending patent applications. Ashwin has published about 145 papers in referred conferences and journals. He has also authored three books in broadband networks called DWDM Network Designs and Engineering Solutions (a networking bestseller), First-Mile Access Networks and Enabling Technologies and Broadband Services: User Needs, Business Models and Technologies for John Wiley. Owing to his many research achievements and contributions, Ashwin was awarded the Government of India’s DAE-SRC Outstanding Research Investigator Award in 2010 as well as the Indian National Academy of Engineering’s (INAE) Young Engineer Award (2010). He has served Program Chair, Co-chair, Publicity chair and workshop chair for IEEE conferences and as Program Committee member for IEEE ICC, Globecom, OFC, ICCCN, Gridnets etc. Ashwin is also a guest editor for IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Network and the founding Editor of the IEEE ComSoc ONTC’s newsletter Prism. He is the Chair of the IEEE Communication Society's Technical Committee on High Speed Networks (TCHSN) 2011-2013. He has been with IIT Bombay since 2005 where he convenes the Gigabit Networking Laboratory (GNL). The Gigabit Networking Laboratory has secured over 11 million USD in funding since its inception and has been involved in 4 major technology transfers to the industry.