Anees Shaikh is with the Network Infrastructure team at Google where he leads work on management automation, network reliability, and cloud networking in Google’s production networks. Prior to joining Google, he was the Chief SDN Architect in IBM System Networking where he was responsible for IBM's software-defined networking product architecture, including leading IBM’s open source networking engagements. While at Google, Anees founded the OpenConfig operator working group, and at IBM was a founder of the OpenDaylight SDN controller project. For over a decade, Anees was with the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center working on networking and systems solutions in support of IBM’s products and services. Anees has published widely in the areas of networking, cloud computing, and system management, and has been an invited speaker in numerous industry forums.

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Beck Mason is Lumentum’s Senior Vice President and General Manager, Telecom Transmission. In 2018, he joined the company through Lumentum’s acquisition of Oclaro where he was President, Integrated Photonics Business. Prior to that role, Dr. Mason served as Senior Vice President of R&D, Integrated Photonics Business. Before joining Oclaro, he held several management positions at JDSU most recently as its Vice President of R&D for Transmission Products. Dr. Mason has also served in a variety of technology management roles at Collinear, Finisar Corporation, Agere Systems, and Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories. Dr. Mason holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada, a Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Toronto in Canada and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

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Bikash is currently the Vice President of Global Networking at Google. Bikash’s team is responsible for design, build and operation of Google’s massive global network that every Google service relies upon.

Prior to Google, Bikash was the Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Juniper Networks. In this role, Bikash charted Juniper’s technology strategy and led the execution of the company’s critical technology innovations. Specifically, Bikash was responsible for Juniper’s telco cloud and virtualization, multicloud enterprise datacenter and software defined enterprise networking products and technologies.

Prior to Juniper, Bikash spent close to ten years at Google, where he was a Distinguished Engineer and the Head of Network Architecture, Engineering and Planning. Prior to Google, Bikash was the CTO of Qstreams Networks, a company he co-founded. He also spent several years at Ciena Corporation in various technical roles developing DWDM and Ethernet technologies.

He is an industry-leading expert on network function virtualization, intent driven networking (IDN), multicloud networking, warehouse-scale computing, and hyperscale network infrastructures.

Bikash received a BTech from IIT, India; and MS and PhD degrees from the University of Maryland at College Park, all in Electrical Engineering.

Bill Gartner is Senior Vice President/GM of of Cisco's Optical Systems and Optics Group. In this role, Bill has P&L responsibility for these businesses and is responsible for strategic direction, product development, product positioning and new product introduction. Prior to joining Cisco, Bill was Chief Operating Officer of Meriton Networks (acquired by Xtera Networks). Prior to Meriton, Bill served as President and COO of Mahi Networks and COO of Photuris. Before joining Photuris, he was Vice President and General Manager of Lucent's Optical Networking Systems business, responsible for Metro, Access, and Long Haul DWDM Products. His earlier tenure in the industry included roles at AT&T Bell Labs and Paradyne. Bill has served on the boards of OptronX (acquired by JDSU) and CyOptics. Bill has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech, a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and an Executive Master’s in Technology Management from University of Pennsylvania/Wharton. He is a University of Pennsylvania Moore Fellow, and holds three patents.

Chuck Mattera is the Chief Executive Officer of II-VI. He initially served as a member of the II-VI Board from 2000 until 2002. Dr. Mattera joined the Company as Vice President in 2004, and served as Executive Vice President from January 2010 to November 2013, when he became Chief Operating Officer. He was re-appointed to the Board in 2012. In November 2014, Dr. Mattera became the President and Chief Operating Officer. In September 2016, Dr. Mattera became the Company’s third President and Chief Executive Officer in 45 years. During his career at II-VI he has assumed successively broader management roles, including as a lead architect of the Company’s diversification strategy. He has provided vision, energy and dispatch to the Company’s growth initiatives, including overseeing the acquisition-related integration activities in the United States, Europe, and Asia – especially in China – thereby establishing additional platforms. These have contributed to a new positioning of the Company into large and transformative global growth markets while increasing considerably the global reach of the Company, deepening the technology and IP portfolio, broadening the product roadmap and customer base, and increasing the potential of II-VI.

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David F. Welch, Ph.D., is Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Infinera. In this role, he drives deep business and technology innovation through forward-looking strategies, including breakthrough technologies and technology partnerships, in addition to innovative business and market directions. Dr. Welch is currently a member of Infinera’s Board of Directors, where he has served the company since 2010. Dr. Welch’s past roles at Infinera include Chief Strategy and Technology Officer from 2017 to 2018, President from 2013 to 2017, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer from 2004 to 2013 and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) from 2001 to 2004. Prior to co-founding Infinera, he served as CTO, Transmission Division at JDS Uniphase, and in various executive roles, including CTO and Vice President of Corporate Development, at Spectra Diode Labs (SDL). Dr. Welch currently serves on the Board of Directors several start-up companies. He holds over 130 patents, and over 300 technical publications, and has been awarded the Optical Society of America’s (OSA) Adolph Lomb Medal, Joseph Fraunhofer Award and John Tyndall Award, as well as the Institute of Engineering Technology’s J J Thompson Medal for Electronics. He is a Fellow of OSA and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Welch holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.

David Heard has served as Infinera’s CEO and has been a member of their Board of Directors since November 2020. Mr. Heard joined Infinera in June 2017 and served as the company’s Chief Operating Officer from October 2018 to November 2020. During his time as COO, Mr. Heard was responsible for leading the innovation of new solutions and the overall operational excellence of the company, overseeing functions including corporate development, facilities, human resources, information technology, marketing, operations, product lifecycle management, quality, research and development and services.

Mr. Heard brings a proven track record of technology industry leadership, with more than 25 years of success in the industry. Prior to Infinera, Mr. Heard served as President of Network and Service Enablement at JDS Uniphase (now Viavi) from 2010 to 2015, and as COO at BigBand Networks (now Arris) from 2007 to 2010. Earlier roles included President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Somera (now Jabil), President and General Manager, Switching Division, at Tekelec (now Oracle), President and CEO at Santera Systems, and various positions at Lucent Technologies and AT&T.

Mr. Heard holds a BA in Production and Operations Management from Ohio State University, an MBA from the University of Dayton, and an MS in Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was a Sloan Fellow.

Dhiraj is VP of Engineering and Business Development at Cerebras Systems. Dhiraj has over 20 years of executive leadership experience directing large, high-performing engineering teams at Intel, AMD and startups like SeaMicro and NexGen. Prior to Cerebras, Dhiraj was CTO and VP Architecture for Intel’s $20B Data Center business. Before Intel, he was an integral part of the executive leadership team as VP Engineering at SeaMicro prior to its acquisition by AMD, after which he continued at AMD as Corporate VP and GM of the Server Solutions division. Dhiraj serves as an advisor to several VC-backed companies and holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

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Edward G. Tiedemann, Jr. is a Qualcomm Fellow and a Senior Vice President of Engineering of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. He leads Qualcomm’s worldwide standardization and industry organization activities. Dr. Tiedemann was instrumental in the design and development of the TIA/EIA/IS-95 CDMA system, also called cdmaOne™. He led Qualcomm’s, and much of the industry’s, efforts in the design and development of the third-generation cdma2000® system. Dr. Tiedemann led the offline industry group on M2M convergence, which resulted in oneM2M. In addition to being on the board of the MulteFire Alliance, Dr. Tiedemann is also on the board of the Open Mobile Alliance and the Open Connectivity Foundation. Prior to becoming involved with terrestrial wireless communications, Dr. Tiedemann was involved with numerous commercial and military satellite systems. From 1977 to 1988, Dr. Tiedemann was at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he worked on mmWave satellite communications systems. Dr. Tiedemann holds a Ph.D. degree from MIT where he worked in the areas of queueing theory and communications networks. He holds a Master of Science degree from Purdue University where he worked on bandwidth efficient modulation. He also holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and StateUniversity (Va Tech). Dr. Tiedemann is past chairman ofthe Advisory Board of the College of Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and StateUniversity (Va Tech). He currently sits on the Advisory Board of the Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is also a member of the Board of Overseers of the Peabody Essex Museum. Dr. Tiedemann was General Chair of GLOBECOM2015, one of the IEEE Communications Society flagship conferences.

Eve Griliches is the Product Marketing lead for the Optical BU. Previously, Eve was Director of Solutions Marketing at BTI Systems and Managing Partner of the global research firm ACG Research where she was VP of Optical Networking. Before ACG, Eve served as IDC Program Director for Telecommunications Equipment, where she provided in-depth analysis on key telecom market technologies. Additionally, Eve has more than 10 years of product line management experience at equipment vendors including Marconi (Ericsson), PhotonEx, Nortel Networks, Bay Networks and Wellfleet Communications. She also spent four years at Thinking Machines Corporation, one of the first parallel processing supercomputer companies.

Greg Pettine is a data center industry leader with a superior track record for achieving revenue and profit goals. His deep knowledge of data center requirements and trends has been instrumental in building multi-million-dollar businesses from inception to successful exit. Prior to co-founding EdgeMicro, Greg led strategic alliances for Schneider Electric’s Data Center Service Provider group. There, he focused on the cloud and colocation markets, implementing business drivers around speed-to-market, capital preservation and cutting-edge design. Previously, Greg served as VP , Data Center Solutions, for CB Richard Ellis (CBRE), the world’s largest real estate service. Prior to CBRE, Greg executed DCI Technologies’ disposition of $200 million dollars of enterprise data center inventory that became stranded in the aftermath of the dot-com era. Greg was also a co-founder and VP at Endur Inc., a developer of enterprise computing campuses that was acquired by a Fortune 100 corporation. A frequent industry speaker, Greg is active in a number of data center technology groups. He holds a BS degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines.

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Hans-Juergen Schmidtke is Director of Engineering in Facebook's Infrastructure Foundation team based in Menlo Park, CA. In this role he is part of a team that is Engineering Facebook's Network Infrastructure. In previous roles at Juniper Networks, Hans-Juergen Schmidtke was VP of Product Management in the CTO office, VP of Advanced Technologies, and Chief Architect for Converged Core. In these roles he was responsible for the architecture of SDN, data center, access, core, edge solution, and WLAN. Before joining Juniper, he was Head of the Fixed Network Operator Business in North America for Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) that is now part of Nokia. Over the years at NSN and Siemens Communications, he has held positions in product management and general management in both Germany and the US. He worked on various aspects of optical physics and communications technology from advanced research, to product development, to real-world large-scale deployments. He studied physics at the University of Dusseldorf and at the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and received his PhD from the University of Wurzburg.

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Hwa-Jung Han is a Director of Emerging Technology, currently responsible for SDN strategy, architecture, validation and high level design in support of Verizon’s next generation network transformation initiative. She is also responsible for overall network virtualization strategy and planning for Verizon network infrastructure. Prior to current responsibility, she had various data network architecture and technology responsibilities in Verizon business network organizations. She started her career as a software engineer, developed first programmable switch at MCI and has been with Verizon for 21 years.

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Jan Söderström is V.P. and Head of Technology Office Silicon Valley at Ericsson reporting to Ericsson Group CTO. In this capacity he drives the Ericsson technology leadership work in 5G, Cloud and IOT in a collaboration with ecosystem partners in Silicon Valley. A central part in this work is the co-creation work in D-fifteen Labs, enabling partners and customers to develop and test new use cases on a real 5G network platform. Jan has a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Chalmers University of Technology, augmented with a one-year research scholarship at California Institute of Technology. He spent his early industrial career working with optoelectronic devices and optical networking at Ericsson Microelectronics, first as development manager and later as product line head. He then had a decade long engagement at Ericsson Research heading the research in IP and Cloud. During this time, he spent three years in Silicon Valley building up the Ericsson Research lab in San Jose. He started the Ericsson engagement in SDN and Openflow in cooperation with the Stanford Cleanslate project and his team also pioneered the Ericsson work on Openstack and cloud orchestration. In 2013 Jan moved to Business Unit Networks to drive the Ericsson Cloud transformation initiative. He held the roles of Head of Product line Cloud, Head of Target Area Cloud and Head of the NFV-program until he moved to his current position in early

Jason Hoffman is the Chairman and CEO of MobiledgeX, a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary focused on edge computing. Previously, he was a CTO at Ericsson AB and was P&L responsible for their cloud and datacenter infrastructure business. While at Ericsson his group created the world’s first hyperscale, disaggregated system and led the market in the modernization of telecom infrastructure. Prior to Ericsson, he was a founder and CTO at Joyent (now owned by Samsung), a pioneering high performance cloud IaaS and software provider, where he ran product, engineering, operations and commercial management for a decade. Joyent launched the world's first container-as-a-service offering in 2004, the most popular asynchronous runtime (node.js) in 2009, the most secure KVM-based VMs in 2009 and the world's first serverless offering in 2013. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of large scale cloud computing, in particular the use of container technologies, asynchronous, high concurrency runtimes and converged server, storage and networking systems. Jason is also an angel investor, strategy and execution advisor, venture and private equity advisor and has served on the boards of companies and foundations. Jason has a BS and MS from UCLA and a PhD from UCSD. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and children.

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Kailem Anderson is Vice President of Portfolio and Engineering for Blue Planet, a division of Ciena. His responsibilities include global ownership of Blue Planet’s portfolio strategy, direction, development and introduction of new disruptive offerings in the areas of automation, orchestration, analytics, software, SaaS and global services. Well-established in the networking industry for 20 years, Kailem has held various leadership positions at Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft, where he focused on introducing new technologies to market in the areas of networking, security, data center, automation and SaaS. Kailem holds a bachelor’s degree in Engineering and an MBA from the University of New South Wales and resides in Sydney, Australia.

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Karthik Sethuraman is a Principal Software & SDN Architect at NEC/Netcracker and is primarily involved in technology strategy and planning for Service Orchestration and SDN Control systems. He has extensive experience in architecting, designing and hands-on coding of control and management software systems for TDM, WDM and Packet transport networks. He has been active in SDN field since its early days as co-editor of ONF Openflow Optical extensions and is actively involved in the standardization of the technology in the industry. Karthik is a co-chair of the MEF LSO (Lifecycle Services Orchestration) Committee and leads the MEF LSO Legato & LSO Presto API standards development. Karthik also leads the ONF Transport API (TAPI) project, is a TST member of ONF Open Transport Configuration & Control (OTCC) and Open Information Model & Tools (OIMT) projects and an contributes to the Open Disaggregated Transport Network (ODTN) platform. Karthik has a degree in Computer Science and spent his early career in AI systems research.

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Ron Johnson manages Cisco’s optical portfolio and the integration of IP and Optical. He has held this position for 12 years and has worked with Cisco’s optical group for more than 19 years. He holds multiple patents related to Cisco’s product offerings. Ron’s team is responsible for recent innovation and integration in DWDM, Packet and TDM technologies. Ron has been in telecom for the last 22 years. Starting out in Pacific Bell/SBC where he obtained a large carrier operational perspective that has found it’s way into Cisco’s IP+Optical portfolio.

Seungjoo Hong, has over 20 years of experience in optical transport network, is responsible for the R&D of mobile fronthaul solution in SK telecom from 2011 when he joined. In 2000-2011, he worked in LG Information & Communications, LG Electronics, LG-Nortel and Ericssion-LG for developing various optical transport systems. He developed the world first CWDM multi sub-channel technology for mobile fronthaul solution in 2014, and since 2004, has been developing various WDM-PON systems such as Injection locked method and AMCC method. He not only developed the C-/L-band Injection locked WDM-PON systems for 100Mbps 32 channel in 2006, 1Gbps 16 channel in 2009 and 1Gbps 32 channel in 2010, but also developed the CWDM Sub-channel based WDM-PON system using AMCC for 4G LTE mobile fronthaul in 2016. He developed the world first WDM-PON system for 5G NR mobile fronthaul in 2018 and commercialized it in 2019. His current research interests include the optical access technology for the next generation wireless and wireline access network, as well as the CWDM Sub-channel technology.

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Shamim Akhtar has been in optical networking industry for over 2 decades covering every facets of optical networks from broadband access, transport to warehouse scale data centers. Shamim has played key role in the transformation of optical industry across the world. During his long stint at Comcast Shamim architected and laid the key foundation of fiber deep HFC/Docsis network and commoditized DWDM transport network unit cost through multi-vendor interop. Shamim, currently leads the optical networking domain of Apple’s global network and Data Centers. His insight into the photonics/broadband technologies has helped shape many companies and standards bodies for several years.

When not collecting really hard puzzles and dying often in his favorite first person shooters William is a real-time communications expert and a core developer of the Freeswitch project, William led the development of Flowroute’s core tech, Portugal Telecom next generation network, and the Silent Circle network. You can find William on Discord at william_subspace#0451

Xiang Liu has more than 20 years of experience in the optical communication industry. At Futurewei, he is responsible for advanced optical technologies and industry development for transmission and access networks. Before joining Futurewei, Xiang had been with Bell Labs working on high-speed optical transmission technologies for 14 years. Xiang has a Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics from Cornell University. He has authored over 350 publications and holds over 95 US patents. He has served as a General Co-Chair of OFC 2018, and is currently serving as a Deputy Editor of Optics Express and an Executive Committee member of the IEEE ON2020 industry connection activity. Dr. Liu is a Fellow of the IEEE and the OSA.

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