Roy Chua is Founder and Principal at AvidThink, an independent research and advisory service formed in 2018 out of SDxCentral's research group. Prior to co-founding SDxCentral and running its research and product teams, Roy was a management consultant working with both Fortune 500 and startup technology companies on go-to-market and product consulting.  As an early proponent of the software-defined infrastructure movement, Roy is a frequent speaker at technology events in the telco and cloud space and a regular contributor to leading online publications. A graduate of UC Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science program and MIT's Sloan School of Business, Roy has 20+ years of experience in telco and enterprise cloud computing, networking and security, including founding several Silicon Valley startups.

Since October 2011 Diego R. Lopez is in charge of Technology Exploration at the Global CTO Unit, within Telefónica I+D. His responsibilities are related to the definition and coordination of research projects in the areas of new networking technologies and network infrastructures. He is directly involved in activities related to network virtualization, core optimization, AAA, traffic analysis, and infrastructure security.   He is actively participating in the ETSI ISG on Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), chairing its Technical Steering Committee. He is acting as representative of Telefónica in bodies related to network technologies, like the ONF and the BBF, and contributing to several working groups inside IETF.Diego have been appointed by the European Commission as member of the High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data e-Infrastructures (HLEG-SDI).   He received his MS from the University of Granada in 1985, and his PhD degree from the University of Seville in 2001. Since 1985 he have worked for several private and public organisations, developing and deploying communication services.   From 2000 to 2011 he was responsible for the Middleware Area of RedIRIS, the Spanish National Research and Educational Network. As part of these tasks he actively participate in national and international working groups and projects, and he have collaborated in several versions of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group White Paper, under the auspices of the EU Presidency, in areas related to security and digital identity services.   His current areas of interest are network middleware and network intelligence, virtualization of network architectures, control and signaling protocols, infrastructural and mediation service, and new network architectures and services  Specialities: NFV and Software Networks. Internet middleware. Federated architectures. Directories (LDAP). Identity management systems: SAML, OpenID, OAuth. PKI. Internet security. RESTful services. RDF. SDN: OpenFlow

Educated at Loughborough University of Technology between 1977 and 1984, he joined Plessey Telecommunications where he worked on Software Engineering and Analysis. Since 1990 he has worked on network development in the area of Intelligent Networks and the standardisation thereof. He has chaired the NGN Protocols in ETSI including the IMS adaptation to fixed networks and the Common IMS programme. He was elected as ETSI TC M2M Protocols WG Chairman. Also, he has been actively involved in the ITU-T Smart Focus Group.   He was appointed as chairman of the M2M Protocols activity in oneM2M the global Standards Partnership Project. Also, he was appointed as Leader of the M2M Service Enablement & Utilities Standardization. Currently, he is working for Huawei Technologies to lead and chair the ETSI ISG ENI (Experiential Networked intelligence) and ETSI ISG PDL (Permissioned Distributed Ledger) Vice-Chairman.

Laurent Ciavaglia is Senior Researcher and Standardization Specialist in the Autonomous Networks Research & Innovation Department at Rakuten Mobile.  Previously, Laurent was with Nokia inventing future network automation technologies with focus on intent-driven, zero-touch and artificial intelligence techniques.   Laurent is an experienced standards contributor as editor and co-author of multiple specifications in the IETF, IRTF and ETSI in the fields of telemetry, zero-touch networking, intent-based networking, autonomic networking, closed-loop operation and coordination, and integration of machine learning and machine reasoning functionalities in networking environments.   Laurent serves as co-chair of the IRTF Network Management Research Group (NRMG) and participates in standardization activities related to network and service automation in IETF and ETSI.   Laurent is also of IEEE ComS Standards Liaison Officer of the IEEE Network Intelligence ETI (Emerging Technical Initiative) and an active member of the IEEE ComSoc Technical Committee on Network Operation and Management (CNOM), chair of the CNOM Autonomous Networking Technologies Special Interest Group, after having served as CNOM vice-chair in 2017-2019.   Laurent has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE SDN initiative Softwarization newsletter from 2016 to 2019, and regularly serve as reviewer for IEEE conferences, journals and magazines. Laurent also has a good experience in organizing multiple special issues as guest editor, international workshops and industry events. Laurent participates regularly to the Organizing and Technical Committees of IEEE CNOM and ComSoc conferences in various roles.   Laurent has co-authored 70+ articles in referenced journals and conferences, including more than 30 keynote talks, invited papers, expert panels and tutorials.

Roy Chua is Founder and Principal at AvidThink, an independent research and advisory service formed in 2018 out of SDxCentral's research group. Prior to co-founding SDxCentral and running its research and product teams, Roy was a management consultant working with both Fortune 500 and startup technology companies on go-to-market and product consulting.  As an early proponent of the software-defined infrastructure movement, Roy is a frequent speaker at technology events in the telco and cloud space and a regular contributor to leading online publications. A graduate of UC Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science program and MIT's Sloan School of Business, Roy has 20+ years of experience in telco and enterprise cloud computing, networking and security, including founding several Silicon Valley startups.

Zhenbin Li is in charge of the research and standard promotion work of IP protocols. Before that he had been the Chief IP/MPLS Service Architect and the Chief Architect of SDN controller to be responsible for the service and architecture design of IP software platform and SDN controller.  Zhenbin Li and his team are taking an active part in the IP/MPLS/SDN standardization work in IETF and promote the innovation of SR, BGP/VPN, PCE, SBI/NBI, Telemetry, etc.

As Vice President of Products for Service Providers at F5, Ahmed is a computer scientist with nearly 30 years of experience encompassing every aspect of networking and sales previously at Juniper Networks and Nortel. Under his leadership, his service provider-focused team at F5 is focused on unlocking and enabling secure networking and IT as well as infrastructure transformation to support agile, modern applications.   Ahmed builds and translates strategy into clear operating plans, tactics and successful execution, with the collective goal to help service providers solve their most pressing business challenges and navigate constant change successfully. A lifelong learner, he champions ongoing professional development and shares his knowledge on current topics like 5G at the intersection of cloud, and Kubernetes skills.   Ahmed has degrees in Electrical Engineering, a Masters in Computer Sciences, and a PhD in Computer Networking. He is currently based in Paris.

Bruno Decraene is a network architect in Orange and a senior Orange Expert.   He contributes to IETF standardization in the routing area with 27 RFCs, 21 actives drafts and the co-chair of the SPRING WG defining Segment Routing.

Dr. Xipeng Xiao has been with Huawei Datacom SID (Standard & Industry Dev.) since 2019. Previously, he was chief engineer of the Network Solution Sales Dept of Huawei Europe. In that role, he worked extensively with key European operators at various levels.   Prior to Huawei, he served as Marketing Director at Riverstone Networks and Director of Product Management at Redback Networks. He also served as a Senior Manager at Global Crossing Telecom where he deployed and managed Global Crossing’s IP/MPLS network. Dr. Xiao has authored 4 IETF RFCs.   Dr. Xiao is a frequent speaker at a number of industry forums and conferences, and he serves as a member of the technical steering committee of the MPLS World Congress. He is the author of the book, “Technical, Commercial and Regulatory Challenges of QoS”.

Mustapha Aissaoui is a Product Manager in the Service Router Product Group of the IP Networks Division at Nokia.   He holds an Electrical Engineering Diploma from Polytechnic School of Algiers and a MASc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa.   Mustapha Aissaoui has been in the Product Management role since 2004 and is responsible for the MPLS and Segment Routing features in the SR OS based routers. He is also the lead PLM for the SR-OS based PCEP and other SDN features of the NSP PCE controller.   Mustapha Aissaoui is an active participant of the IETF MPLS, PCE, and SPRING working groups. He is a co-author and a major contributor to many drafts in these working groups.

Julian Lucek is a Sr Distinguished Systems Engineer at Juniper Networks, where he has been working with many operators on the design and evolution of their networks.  Before joining Juniper Networks, he worked at BT. He has a PhD in ultrahigh-speed optical transmission and processing from Cambridge University. He also has a Master's degree in Physics from Cambridge University. He is the holder of several patents in the area of communications technology.  He is co-author of the book "MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies", by Ina Minei and Julian Lucek.

Jesper has more than 20 years of experience working in high tech industries. Most recently he co-founded several start-ups developing software solutions leveraging cloud computing and smartphones/tablets.   Previously, Jesper was Head of the T-Mobile USA Customer Team at Nokia Siemens Networks and VP Sales at Siemens Communications USA. He was Director of Sales at Alcatel-Lucent. He was VP Sales and Business Development at Spatial Wireless, a mobile soft-switch start-up company (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent).  Jesper started his professional career at Ericsson, where he worked for 15 years and held various positions in development, customer project management, customer technical support, sales and business development in Sweden and the USA.

Daniel is a Technical Director at Bell Canada involved in research and development of disruptive technologies transforming the Telco space and Bell Canada’s network and services.  He is currently working on the edge cloud strategy and cloud-native transformation leveraging optimized CP/UP separation and advances in network and hardware programming.  He is involved in various open source community projects such as FD.io, Network Service Mesh and P4.org. He is also a participating member at the IETF and BBF, co-authoring and collaborating on various drafts for SPRING based service-programming and SFC.

Carsten Rossenhoevel is Managing Director and Co-Founder of EANTC AG (European Advanced Networking Test Center). Based in Berlin, Germany, EANTC is a test lab specializing in telecommunication technologies and offers vendor-neutral network testing services for manufacturers, service providers, and enterprise customers.  In this role, Carsten has over 20 years of experience in telecommunication networks testing and is responsible for EANTC's business development and marketing.  His technical areas of expertise include Network Functions Virtualization and transport network solutions.

Roy Chua is Founder and Principal at AvidThink, an independent research and advisory service formed in 2018 out of SDxCentral's research group. Prior to co-founding SDxCentral and running its research and product teams, Roy was a management consultant working with both Fortune 500 and startup technology companies on go-to-market and product consulting.  As an early proponent of the software-defined infrastructure movement, Roy is a frequent speaker at technology events in the telco and cloud space and a regular contributor to leading online publications. A graduate of UC Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science program and MIT's Sloan School of Business, Roy has 20+ years of experience in telco and enterprise cloud computing, networking and security, including founding several Silicon Valley startups.

Zhenbin Li is in charge of the research and standard promotion work of IP protocols. Before that he had been the Chief IP/MPLS Service Architect and the Chief Architect of SDN controller to be responsible for the service and architecture design of IP software platform and SDN controller.  Zhenbin Li and his team are taking an active part in the IP/MPLS/SDN standardization work in IETF and promote the innovation of SR, BGP/VPN, PCE, SBI/NBI, Telemetry, etc.

Mustapha Aissaoui is a Product Manager in the Service Router Product Group of the IP Networks Division at Nokia.   He holds an Electrical Engineering Diploma from Polytechnic School of Algiers and a MASc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa.   Mustapha Aissaoui has been in the Product Management role since 2004 and is responsible for the MPLS and Segment Routing features in the SR OS based routers. He is also the lead PLM for the SR-OS based PCEP and other SDN features of the NSP PCE controller.   Mustapha Aissaoui is an active participant of the IETF MPLS, PCE, and SPRING working groups. He is a co-author and a major contributor to many drafts in these working groups.

Julian Lucek is a Sr Distinguished Systems Engineer at Juniper Networks, where he has been working with many operators on the design and evolution of their networks.  Before joining Juniper Networks, he worked at BT. He has a PhD in ultrahigh-speed optical transmission and processing from Cambridge University. He also has a Master's degree in Physics from Cambridge University. He is the holder of several patents in the area of communications technology.  He is co-author of the book "MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies", by Ina Minei and Julian Lucek.

Clarence Filsfils, a Cisco Systems Fellow, has a 20-year expertise leading innovation, productization, marketing and deployment for Cisco Systems.   Trusted and respected by key decision makers across major WEB/OTT, SP’s and large Enterprises, Clarence enjoys working with these operators to listen to their needs and requirements, and then get things done from product design to deployment.   He invented the Segment Routing Technology (over 40 patents) and is leading its productization, marketing and deployment at record execution speed. For this contribution, he received the Pioneer Award - Cisco's most prestigious award honoring innovative engineering. The award celebrates engineering contribution that brings growth in new markets, redefines current markets, and provides game-changing improvements to engineering productivity.   Previously, Clarence invented and led the Fast Routing Convergence Technology (over 30 patents) and was the lead designer for Cisco System’s QoS (20 patents) and large-scale IP/MPLS deployments.   Clarence is a regular speaker at leading industry conferences. He holds over 130 patents and is a prolific writer, either in academic circle (Sigcomm 2015), or standard (8 RFC’s, 20 drafts on standard’s track) or books.   Clarence holds a Masters in Management from Solvay Business School and a Masters of Engineering in Computer Science from the University of Liege.

Yuanchao Su, Director of AliCloud Network Architecture, leading the team responsible for AliCloud global infrastructure network architecture & IBN based platform R&D.  Before joined AliCloud, He was a Principal Engineer of Cisco & a member of China MIIT Technical Committee.  He has been in telecommunications/networking industry for 20 years, he is the chief architect for multiple China SP/OTT national backbones & 5G carrying networks. He is also a technical writer, he translated Segment Routing Part I & Part II into Chinese.