Moderators

David has over 25 years of experience in the telecommunications industry at multiple vendors including Juniper, Nortel or Eico-Dialogic. During the 13 years at Juniper he has worked closely with large Service Providers around the world in network modernization, virtualization and monetization projects. Currently he works closely with the Strategic Alliances developing an open partner ecosystem for 5G and beyond, including NEC, IBM-RedHat or Ericsson.

David is Computer Engineer by UAB and executive-MBA; is a regular speaker at events and author of multiple articles and blogs at Juniper Networks.

Oriol Sallent is co-author of 14 books and has published 280+ papers in high-impact IEEE journals and renowed international conferences. His main research interests are 5G/6G RAN (Radio Access Network) planning and artificial intelligence-based radio resource management. He has participated in 40+ European and national projects, with diverse responsibilities as Principal Investigator, Coordinator and Workpackage Leader. He regularly serves as a consultant for private companies and has contributed to standardisation bodies such as 3GPP, IEEE and ETSI.

Xavier Costa-Pérez is ICREA Research Professor, Scientific Director at the i2CAT Research Center and Head of 6G Networks R&D at NEC Laboratories Europe. His research focuses on the digital transformation of society driven by the interplay of mobile networks and AI. His team generates research results which are regularly published at top scientific venues, produces innovations which have received several awards for successful technology transfers, participates in major European Commission R&D collaborative projects and contributes to standardization bodies such as 3GPP, O-RAN, ETSI NFV/MEC/RIS and IETF. As a standards delegate, he contributed to multiple standardization bodies (e.g. IEEE 802.11, 802.16, WiFi Alliance, 3GPP, …) and was recognized in several standards as a top contributor. He has served on the Organizing Committees of several conferences (including IEEE Greencom, WCNC, and INFOCOM), published papers of high impact and holds tenths of granted patents. Currently, he is serving as Associate Editor at IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC) and Elsevier Computer Communications journals (COMCOM). Xavier received both his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Telecommunications from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) in Barcelona and was the recipient of a national award for his Ph.D. thesis.

Dr. Muhammad Shuaib Siddiqui is a senior researcher at i2CAT Foundation where he is also the Area Manager for Software Networks research lab and Research Manager of Cyber security lab. His current research topics include network automation, SDN/NFV based control, management, & orchestration platforms for 5G, network slicing, NFV/SDN security and 5G security. Currently, he is also coordinating the H2020 5GZORRO (5G PPP Phase 3 project). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UPC (Spain), M.Sc. in Communication Systems (2007) from EPFL, Switzerland, and B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (2004) from KFUPM, Saudi Arabia. One of his publications, based on his PhD thesis, received the IEEE Internet Technical Committee (ITC) paper of the year award for 2015.