Role and Impact of Generative AI & AI in Wireless

Arda Akman has more than 25 years of research and development experience in telecommunications, especially in wireless networks. In his current position as Senior Director of Software Engineering in Juniper Networks, he is leading the architecture, product management and standardization activities of 5G products with focus on O-RAN RIC, use cases (r/xApps), network slicing and RAN intelligence.

Prior to his current position, Arda was the Director of Software Development, Wireless Division of Argela/Netsia where he led the architecture and development of 4G and 5G RIC, RAN Slicing, the development of 4G macro base station radio resource management layer, SON and FCAPS components. Prior to Argela/Netsia, he held various technical managerial positions including Turk Telekom R&D where he led multi-national EU research projects and telecom solutions, in Ixia leading the physical layer team and the development of wireless network test equipment for GSM, UMTS and LTE technologies, including a 4G multi-UE simulator, and Nortel Networks focusing on carrier grade products for fixed and mobile telecommunication technologies.

He is involved in standardization activities and is a very active member of O-RAN, leading Juniper delegation, chairing O-RAN WG1 Use Case Task Group, chairing WG1 Slicing Task Group and editor of several technical specifications related to RIC. He received his BSc and MSc in Electronics Engineering (EE) from METU, Ankara, Turkey in 1994 and 1997 respectively. He has authored various articles and more than 30 patent applications.

Masood Amin is VP and Head of Technology and Innovation at Capgemini leading the Capgemini incubation projects for emerging technologies. Over 20+ years, Masood has led the Product Management, Business Management, Advance Connectivity Eco-system, Solution Development and Architecture teams.

Masood leads Capgemini emerging technology portfolio, which includes 5G, Satellite Communication, 6G, High speed Optical and Ethernet, Autonomous Networks and Future of compute. The portfolio incubates and curate the future of networks & compute to bring best of technology and eco system to our partners and customers.

Chandrasekher is Founder and CEO of Aira Technologies Inc. - a company that is focused on radically re-imagining wireless communications using machine learning. Chandrasekher is a seasoned global, technology, and management executive with a track record for delivering results. He has expertise in global markets and China. As Senior Vice President at Intel Corporation, Chandrasekher held a variety of roles including head of Intel’s mobile business, server and workstation business, world-wide sales organization; and, global marketing. Most recently, he was President of Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, Inc. and Vice Chairman of Huaxintong Semiconductor, Inc. (China). He is known for his pioneering efforts on the Intel Centrino and Atom platforms which helped usher in the modern era of mobility; and, for his work on Intel Xeon and Qualcomm’s Centriq ARM servers. Chandrasekher presently also serves on the board of Avalanche Technology Inc.; and, is a Founder and board member for DeepSight Technology Inc.; he was also a strategic advisor to UPmem, S.A. (processor-in-memory company), Cycuity (hardware based trusted computing company), and, Dimensional Mechanics (machine learning automation company). Chandrasekher was also a Senior Advisor at McKinsey & Company.

Chandrasekher is a founding board member on Cornell’s College of Computing & Information Sciences; a member of Cornell’s Trustee Council; and, a charter member at The Indus Entrepreneurs. Chandrasekher was CRN’s “Innovator of the year” in 2004 for the Intel Centrino platform; and, was cited as one of the “Top 25 CMO’s” in 2014 by Forbes. He is mentioned in Steve Hamm’s book “The race for perfect”; in Judy Estrin’s book “Closing the innovation gap”, and, Kevin Sharer’s “The CEO test - master the challenges that make or break all leaders”. Chandrasekher has also been a visiting lecturer at the Berkeley Haas School of Business. Chandrasekher received his BE, ME and MBA from Cornell University.

Roy Chua is a principal at AvidThink, an independent research and advisory service focused on infrastructure technologies. Roy is a frequent speaker at telecom and cloud conferences, and AvidThink has been quoted by and featured in major publications including the WSJ, Fierce Telecom, Fierce Wireless, The New Stack, and Light Reading. Roy was also a co-founder at SDxCentral, a technology publication. He has previously worked as a management consultant for Fortune 500 and startup companies, specializing in go-to-market and product strategy. Roy is a graduate of UC Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science program and MIT's Sloan School of Business. With over 20 years of experience in telecom and enterprise computing, networking, and security, he has also founded Silicon Valley startups.

Ina Fried is chief technology correspondent for Axios and co-author of its daily tech newsletter Axios AI+. Before joining Axios in 2017, she was a senior editor at Recode, covering mobile, and produced the Code/Mobile series of conferences. Fried previously covered mobile at All Things Digital and spent a decade at CNET covering, among other things, Microsoft and Apple. Her reporting has spanned several continents, two genders, and included chronicling the Hewlett Packard-Compaq merger, Bill Gates’s transition from software giant to philanthropist, and the 2010 Winter and 2021 Summer Olympics. A former national board member for NLGJA: The LGBT Journalists Association, she’s a member of the LBGT Journalists Hall of Fame.

Michael Gallelli is a director in Microsoft’s Corporate Business Development, Strategy & Ventures organization. He drives business and partner strategy and strategic partnerships in collaboration with Microsoft’s Azure for Operators engineering team. He has multiple decades of experience across telco, digital and entertainment media and retail industries and in digital transformation technologies including cloud computing, mobile, mixed reality and analytics. In addition to his current tenure at Microsoft, he has held senior roles in both industry and consulting at T-Mobile, KPMG, 20th Century Fox, Getty Images, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. Michael holds advanced and bachelor degrees from University of Southern California and Vassar College.

Fan Gao is a Partner in McKinsey & Company’s Seattle Office. He joined McKinsey in 2008 and serves a variety of telecommunications and high tech clients on the topics of strategy, network technology, transformation, and M&A. He leads McKinsey’s global research on 5G, and has worked with leading operators in North America, Asia and Europe on the topic.

Recent experience includes:
- Led the end-to-end setup of a Greenfield Operator in Asia, including network buildout, commercial strategy and business case alignment
- Led the network deployment transformation for a Tier 1 US operator
- Led the 5G strategy for several major incumbent telcos in Asia
- Developed the corporate strategy for a leading North American telco, including its network / 5G deployment strategy, GTM approach, and marketing strategy
- Developed the future strategy and roadmap for a global telco equipment OEM, including a revamp of its 5G strategy and GTM approach
- Led a merger for a tier 1 global operator, including developing synergy sizing, newco strategy, diligence and regulatory strategy
- Led a restructuring and cost transformation program for one of the largest telecom operators in North America, including deep-dives into the end-to-end network cost structure, B2B strategy and pricing strategy

Prior to joining McKinsey, Fan worked as a part of IBM Software Group’s strategy team and Softbank’s VC arm. He graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in Electrical Engineering with a focus on telecommunications.

Ravikiran Gopalan is the Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer and AI Systems lead at Aira Technologies. He is broadly responsible for the tech stack at Aira and oversees the scoping, design, development and deployment of Aira’s technology. Beyond the tech. stack, he is also involved in Aira’s strategy, product and business development.

Before delving into entrepreneurship Ravi spent multiple decades in the high tech industry with stints at Bell Labs, Texas Instruments and almost a decade at Qualcomm. Ravi’s technical education is in Electrical Engineering, with a bachelor's degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) and a PhD from University of Notre Dame. His business education is in entrepreneurial leadership with a masters degree from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Matti Hiltunen is the Lead Inventive Scientist at AT&T. Matti received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Arizona. He has worked at AT&T for 23+ years – first at the AT&T Shannon Research Labs and most recently in RAN Technology. Matti has been working on O-RAN and O-RAN Software Community (OSC) since the beginning of these organizations. He was the technical lead/architect from AT&T’s side in the near-RT RIC co-create effort that resulted in the OSC open source near-RT RIC platform. He acted as the PTL for the RICAPP project that develops open source xApps. He is currently the AT&T voting members for O-RAN WG-3 and TIP RIA working group. Matti is interested in any xApp (and rApp) use cases that improve the RAN, reduce costs or enable new RAN services.

Gloria Hong is an Associate Partner in the Southern California office of McKinsey & Company. She is a core leader of Tech, Media and Telecoms (TMT) practice, and serves clients across the value chain of network operations and commercial excellence (B2B/B2C) topics. Gloria has extensive experience leading Tech/ AI Enabled Transformations for telco operators and OEMs/ suppliers.

Relevant experience:
- Led an end-to-end network deployment transformation for a tier-1 US operator, driving digitalization and build acceleration across Design & Planning, Site Acquisition, Inventory Management, and Construction
- Led the optimization of capital planning and management for a Fiber operator, and designed/ implemented cost control tower
- Developed top-level, long-term network strategy for a Canadian tier 1 carrier
- Designed and implemented a deployment orchestration solution with collaboration of a SaaS partner and a Service Implementation partner
- Led a commercial transformation (including GTM approach, marketing strategy, org design) for a leading US telco OEM
- Developed market penetration and expansion strategy, as well as designed the service delivery model for a global Industrial company serving the Telco sector

Prior to joining McKinsey, Gloria worked as a part of Target’s Data Science and Strategy team and led an AI-enabled wearable startup. She holds an MBA degree from Harvard Business School.

Babak is a 20-year veteran executive in the wireless and telecommunications industry. His in-depth understanding of current mobile technologies, together with his awareness of diverse environments, is grounded in two decades of first-hand experience working for mobile operators and vendors across the world. Directly involved in standardization efforts and product developments for 3G, 4G, and 5G mobile networks, Babak is now VP of System Engineering at Aira Technologies.

Before joining Aira, Babak was leading Mavenir’s 5G NR Open RAN product management and customer engagements, leading the first ever 5G SA O-RAN deployment in the world. Before Mavenir, Babak led 5G product management and customer engagement efforts at Ericsson, Casa Systems, and Parallel Wireless. Babak also served as the Vice President of Engineering at Skyriver Communications, the largest fixed wireless service provider in California. Babak earned a Ph.D. in electronic and electrical engineering from King’s College London.

Neerav leads partnerships at Anthropic, an AI safety company that develops reliable, beneficial AI systems. At Anthropic, he has led efforts in fundraising, sales, and partnerships. Prior to Anthropic, he coached founders of AI safety start-ups. Previously, Neerav led philanthropic giving for Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and helped rebuild the public school system in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. He is a graduate of Tulane University and Yale Law School.

With 30 years of experience in management consulting and TMT (Technology, Media, and Telecommunications) industry research, Leonard Lee has advised Global 500 technology companies and service providers on their critical priorities. He is a former managing partner with Gartner Inc. and partner/principal at IBM, EY and PwC with an extensive cross-industry background that includes telecommunications, semiconductor, media & entertainment, consumer electronics, enterprise software, IT services sectors among others.

 Leonard founded neXt Curve, a boutique research advisory firm based in San Diego, CA with the mission of helping TMT industry pioneers explore and pursue opportunities forming at the intersection of transformative technology and industry trends. neXt Curve current advises some of the leading firms in the IT, telecommunications, consumer electronics, and industrial technology sectors on frontier priorities.

Maria Lema is a PhD in Telecoms and Co-Founder of Weaver Labs. She has spent more than 10 years working in the Telecoms sector, from research to innovation and now leading the Start-up scene with Weaver Labs. After her short life as an academic researcher, Maria joined the Team at King's College London to work at the 5G Tactile Internet Lab powered by Ericsson. She has a track record of success in innovative technologies, business management, stakeholder engagement and strategic leadership. With extensive experience in the telecommunications sector and a passion for driving innovation and implementing cutting-edge technologies, Maria has led the company's strategic direction for 5 years. She also sits in the advisory board of UKTIN and frequently speaks at high profile events discussing the role of Academia in innovation, the future of Telecoms and how connectivity can be a catalyst for development and growth in technology and society.

Kaniz is a visionary thinker, a pragmatic technologist, and a dedicated leader, renowned for her ability to excel in uncharted territories with intuitive ease.

From tackling intricate challenges like Voice over LTE to revolutionizing communications through WebRTC, shaping the foundation of 5G with Cloud and AI, spearheading new industries like Distributed Edge, and founding the Open Grid Alliance, Kaniz has consistently transformed the perceived impossible into reality.

In her unwavering pursuit of innovation, Kaniz has held technology leadership roles at esteemed organizations, including Nortel, Ericsson, Huawei, Ciena, and VMware. Throughout her career, she continuously advanced the state of the art, amassing 45+ patent grants and contributing to numerous papers and publications.

Currently serving as the Group Chief Architect at Deutsche Telekom, she passionately drives DT into the next frontier with a resolute focus on "Networks Serving People”.

Manish is the Global Business Head of 5G & Network Services at Tech Mahindra.

Accomplished telecom industry veteran with 20+ years of professional experience. Held various leadership roles in Fortune 100 companies leading technology initiatives from incubation to operationalization that transformed businesses and increased enterprise value.
Driven corporate-wide technology initiatives through cross functional leadership, robust planning and astute execution.

Expert in leading large and global teams, developing end to end technology solutions, and creating / managing strategic partnerships that directly improve enterprise value.

Excellent leadership and management abilities, acknowledged and awarded to deliver superior results in the midst of fast moving changes.

Skilled in analyzing industry trends, assessing threats & opportunities and developing fact-based actionable plans targeted towards business owners and CEOs to increase enterprise value and fulfill company's business missions.

Inventor of 60 patents issued by the US patent office.

Dr. Rakesh Misra is director of R&D in VMware’s Service Provider and Edge Business unit. Before joining VMware, he cofounded Uhana Inc., which commercialized an AI/ML-powered observability and optimization platform for mobile radio access networks (RANs). Uhana was acquired by VMware in 2019. At VMware, he leads the architecture and development of VMware’s open RAN platform and the creation of an ecosystem of RAN applications. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford University and B.Tech. and M.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, all-in electrical engineering.

Udayan Mukherjee is an Intel Senior Fellow and the Chief Architect of wireless products at Network and Edge Group. He leads architecture and product development for 5G radio access, packet core, and private network at the edge. Udayan architected industry's first fully virtualized 5G infrastructure Software (Sub 6 & MMwave) on open architecture through FlexRAN & FlexCore which are being deployed across Geos. Udayan is also responsible for Silicon enhancements for 5G RAN & Core including SoC architecture & instruction set and is also working on developing comprehensive edge architecture while addressing multi access private network implemented @ edge with features like URLLC/TSN, QoS/Slicing & Network AI targeting specific vertical IOT domains.

Udayan is also responsible for establishing new growth areas in network, enterprise & IOT Edge for Intel, including incubating technologies and optimizations for distributed edge processing and the next generation of cloud native network functions, developing wireless-specific intellectual property and leading Intel’s product development by defining private/enterprise network software stack at the edge . Udayan’s research interests include mobile computing and wireless technologies; heterogeneous networks, network virtualization; mobile edge services as well as next-generation air interface protocols & technologies.

A specialist in communications and compute system design and development, Udayan joined Intel in 2000. Before assuming his current role, he led network products development including Cloud-RAN, virtual RAN, base stations based on the LTE and LTE-Advanced standards, and mobile edge platforms, as well as gateways and packet core solutions. Udayan also led AdvancedTCA-based telecom server development as a chief architect in Intel’s Modular Communications Platform Group. He was the principal engineer in technology development in areas such as memory power management and chassis-, shelf- and rack-based manageability software as well as spearheaded Intel’s efforts to deliver the industry’s first draft of a carrier-grade telecom Linux specification.

Before joining Intel, Udayan spent more than a decade leading engineering teams at various technology companies and startups, including Hewlett-Packard Co. and First Data Corp. A three-time recipient of the Intel Achievement Award, Udayan was appointed an Intel Senior Fellow in 2022. He has been granted more than 12 U.S. patents, with additional patents pending, and is the author or co-author of multiple papers on topics related to wireless and telecom technologies.

Dr. Kiran Mukkavilli is a Sr. Director of Engineering in Qualcomm Wireless Research where he currently leads the systems research for sub-24GHz technologies for 5G Advanced and 6G. He joined Qualcomm in 2003, holds more than 150 granted U.S. patents, and has been involved in system design, standardization, implementation, and commercialization of a variety of technologies at Qualcomm. He was one of the principal architects of MediaFLO, a mobile broadcast solution from Qualcomm, and played a key role in the product development, standardization, and commercialization efforts. He was also the systems design lead responsible for commercialization of the UMTS modem in Qualcomm Snapdragon 800/801 products. In his current role, he is responsible for R&D efforts for PHY/MAC system design, standardization, and prototyping for Sub 24GHz aspects of 5G Advanced and 6G. He successfully led Qualcomm’s effort to set up industry’s first end to end 3GPP Rel 15 spec compliant 5G NR call with the leading infra vendors using prototype UE implementation. Dr. Mukkavilli received his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Rice University and holds Bachelor of Technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Ahmed Murad is sr. Director Cloud Strategy at VIAVI Solutions. In his role, he is driving adoption and integration of emerging technologies across VIAVI’s portfolio, including incubation of new products and solutions.

Ahmed has 20+ years of experience in the telecommunications and networking domains working at companies like Spirent and Lenovo, where he held leadership roles across product development, marketing, and general business management. He is an advocate for adoption of open-source technologies, most recently being a board member of Linux Foundation - Open Networking. He has a M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering and post graduate business studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Dr. Ajit Patankar currently leads the AI/ML team in Juniper CTO organization. His team is responsible for the technology strategy, research and the development of leading edge applications in AI/ML area. He is also a member of the Juniper corporate Generative-AI strategy and governance body.

Prior to Juniper, Ajit was a key member of a start-up that was acquired by Ericsson’s Global AI Accelerator (GAIA) division. Earlier he initiated and led Data Science/AI-ML teams in Personal Capital (acquired by Empower) and Financial Engines. He is author of numerous publications in AI/ML and Database areas. Ajit holds a PhD in IEOR from UC Berkeley and BTech from IIT Bombay.

Dr. Gwenael Poitau is the Wireless AI Technology Director at Dell Technologies. He has 20 years of experience developing wireless communication systems for the telecom and defense markets. His professional journey commenced at Wavesat (acquired by Cavium/Marvell) in Montreal developing signal processing algorithms and ASIC architectures for 4G chipsets. He was then promoted as technical lead for LTE R&D. He continued to work on LTE at Interdigital where he generated Intellectual Property on Device-to-Device communications and contributed to 3GPP standardization. He transitioned to Ultra Electronics in 2010 as Wireless Architect for the new ORION tactical backhaul product line and was promoted Chief Technology Officer in 2013. In addition to his CTO role, he embraced the Head of Engineering position in 2016. In 2019, he co-founded the Resilient Machine learning Institute, in collaboration with École de Technologie Supérieure (Montreal), to enhance the resilience of critical communications systems with distributed AI/ML techniques. In 2022, he joined Dell Technologies as Wireless AI Technology Director. He currently leads Dell research on advanced 5G/6G AI applications with an emphasis on multi-agent systems, agentic GenAI and network sustainability.

Constantine Polychronopoulos is VP, 5G & Telco Cloud, at Juniper Networks. Before joining Juniper, he was VP and CTO of the Telco & Edge Computing division at VMware, leading the development of VMware’s product and technology strategy on NFVI for 4G & 5G markets. Prior to VMware he was VP & CTO of Cloud Networking at Citrix, following the acquisition of Bytemobile, Inc. in 2012. As Founder & CTO of Bytemobile, he led the development of innovative products for web, streaming video and transport protocol optimization for mobile 3G and 4G/LTE networks that were deployed in more than 160 mobile networks around the world.

Prior to that, Constantine was a Professor in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Director of the Center for Supercomputing R&D at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has served as chairman or on the PC of more than 50 international conferences. He has published more than 160 research papers in IEEE and ACM journals and conferences and has more than 35 issued and pending patents. He served on the governance committee of the University of Patras during 2012-2016, and among his recognitions are the NSF Presidential Young Investigator award, the 1998 Bodossaki Foundation Award in Engineering, and the Pascal Chair Professorship at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. In 2015 he was named among the 50 innovators in the 50-year history of the Computer Science Dept. of the University of Illinois. He received his BSc from the University of Athens, his MS from Vanderbilt University and his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Murali Ranganathan is the Connectivity Technology Ecosystems Lead at Meta Platforms. Murali leads the RAN Intelligence and Automation (RIA) sub-group within the TIP OpenRAN project group. Murali’s focus is in bringing ML driven intelligence to closed-loop automation of RAN and brings in experiences leading Self-Organizing Networks (SON) products over the last 10 years. Murali has been in the wireless industry for over 25 years and has worked on performance optimization of satellite and 2G to 5G terrestrial wireless networks at Motorola and Nokia. Murali holds 10 published and awarded patents.

Joao Fonseca Reis is an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company’s Chicago office. He has 20+ years of experience with focus on the telecom sector. He provided strategic advice to wireless and wireline operators, as well as financial sponsors, on a broad range of network-related, analytics and commercial topics. Joao’s areas of expertise include FTTH network deployment, go-to-market approach optimization, market entry strategy and product portfolio definition.

Relevant experience
- Closing the fiber inventory data gap of a USA telecom operator
- Supporting a USA telecom operator optimize fiber installation costs
- Defining the indoors GTM strategy for an indoor coverage USA tech player
- Supporting the telecom ministry of a leading Middle East country
- Multiple Launch Office leadership roles in Africa, Middle East and LATAM
- Optimization of sales and marketing spending for a USA FTTH provider
- Defining the telecom solutions GTM strategy for a USA tech player
- Deploying churn prediction at a LATAM mobile operator
- Migration of inventory systems for USA operator
- Lowering the cost to connect for a USA operator

Cristina Rodriguez is Vice President in the Network & Edge Group, General Manager of the group's Wireless Access Network Division (WAND), and General Manager of the Austin Design Center at Intel Corporation. She leads Intel’s efforts to provide innovative wireless access solutions in both traditional and cloud native networks, enabling the RAN of the future by bringing together 5G, and the build out of the Edge and Artificial Intelligence. Rodriguez has full PnL ownership, responsible for strategy and business plans, technical product marketing, roadmaps, product definition, forecasting, customer relationships, investment decisions and GTM.

Cristina has more than 20 years experience in the networking industry. Her vast experience covers startups through large corporations, like Intel. Her educational background is in electrical engineering and computer science.

Arvind serves mainly telco clients on network cost and operational transformation programs
He is part of the TMT practice and has worked on engagements for telcos globally in the last 15 years

Relevant Experience
- 50 telco network cost benchmarking projects across all regions of the world. Co-leads the proprietary solution on Network operations value capture. Co-leads TMT practice telco infra models solution
- 15 Due Diligence and strategy projects. Recent examples include due diligence on targets in US and Canada related to cabling vendors and distributors, telco passive equipment, small cell vendors, fiber overbuilders and growth strategy work for network OEM. Led development of detailed market models and building GTM strategy
-15 telecom network transformation projects in North America, Europe and APAC leading workstreams on Network Procurement, Network operations, Field Force and 3rd party maintenance contracts. Arvind’s spike is in managing stakeholders in setting cost baselines and designing and implementing improvement levers. Recent examples include massive network transformation programs in US, Canada, Australia, Colombia & Philippines, a ~$1B fiber deployment procurement transformation in US, $100M procurement negotiation for Canadian telco, network org cost transformation for a large integrated telco, network ops and field force transformation program at Australian telco, revamping the network ops structure at multi country operator and using advanced analytics to transform the care operations of a telco vendor
- 5 projects on building new TCO models for network build out and operations. Recent examples include work on 5G private networks and telecom infrastructure for a greenfield city

Education/prior work experience
- Arvind holds an MBA degree from Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi (2001) and has a Bachelors degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Bhopal University, India (1999)
- Prior to McKinsey, Arvind has worked with multiple companies like Accenture in Strategy Consulting, Nokia in Strategy and Planning and at IMRB in B2B Market Research

Salil Sawhney is head of product management for AWS EC2 edge services for cloud-based radio access network (RAN) infrastructure and network automation. His products are built for global telecom customers and also support a broad set of technology partners. Salil’s team builds accelerated compute infrastructure that enables customers to run their preferred containerized cloud RAN software. His teams also built AWS Telco Network Builder, a fully managed service that makes it easy to build, deploy and scale public and private telecom networks on AWS.

Prior to AWS, Salil led wireless ecosystems at Facebook and he was a founding member of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP). At Facebook, Salil’s teams built open, disaggregated connectivity infrastructure hardware and software products with a global partner ecosystem to improve experience for millions of customers. Previously, Salil led teams at Qualcomm to build and optimize modem silicon, mobile devices, and network infrastructure. Salil was also an early engineer at a startup where he built speech recognition systems and launched the first commercial products. Salil earned a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) and Bachelor’s of Engineering degree in Electronics from VJTI, University of Mumbai.

Chetan Sharma is the CEO of Chetan Sharma Consulting and is one of the leading strategists in the mobile industry. Executives from wireless companies around the world seek his accurate predictions, independent insights, and actionable recommendations. He has served as an advisor to senior executive management of several Fortune 100 companies in the wireless space and is probably the only industry strategist who has advised top 10 global mobile data operators across all continents. Chetan has served or serves on the advisory boards of Ericsson, Telefonica, Kymeta, NextNav, Zeotap, Opanga Networks, A5G Networks, Tata Communications, Lotusflare, and a number of other startups. His client list includes who’s who of the wireless/tech industry.

Chetan is the author or co-author of 15 books on wireless including Mobile Advertising: Supercharge your brand in the exploding wireless market and Wireless Broadband: Conflict and Convergence. He is also the editor of the Mobile Future Forward Book Series. His books have been adopted in several corporate training programs and university courses at NYU, Stanford, and Tokyo University. His research work is widely quoted in the industry. Chetan is interviewed frequently by leading international media publications such as Time magazine, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and TechCrunch, and has appeared on NPR, Bloomberg, and CNBC as a wireless technology expert. He is also the chief curator of the mobile thought leadership executive forums – Mobile Future Forward and Mobile Breakfast Series.

Chetan is an advisor to CEOs and CTOs of some of the leading wireless technology companies on product strategy and Intellectual Property (IP) development and serves on the advisory boards of several companies. He is also a sought-after IP strategist and expert witness in the wireless industry and has worked on and testified in some of the most landmark cases in the industry such as Qualcomm vs. Broadcom, Samsung vs. Ericsson, Sprint vs. Verizon, Openwave vs. 724 Solutions, and Upaid vs. Satyam. Chetan is a senior member of IEEE, IEEE Communications Society, and IEEE Computers Society. He has Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Kansas State University and Bachelor of Science degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.

Jane Shen is VP of Technology Strategy and is the Product Technology Manager responsible for next-generation Open RAN DU and accelerators at Mavenir. With a career spanning more than 25 years in the telecommunications industry, she has consistently led initiatives to enhance wireless network performance, reliability, and efficiency.

In her current role, Jane leads a cross-business unit effort to deploy Telco workloads into public clouds, encompassing key components such as 5G RAN, packet core, and IMS. She collaborates closely with industry leaders like Intel, Qualcomm, Marvell, EdgeQ, LeapFrog, and other partners to advance next-generation DU and accelerator technology. Additionally, she leads the technology incubation of RAN instrumentation for AI/ML analytics.

From 2016 to 2021, Jane worked at Futurewei Technology as a Senior Director, leading the MLOps technical planning for the Cloud Core Network BU. She was instrumental in shaping the strategy for the Autonomous Network within the core network domain.

During her 2006 to 2016 decade-long tenure at Mavenir, Jane was Head of Platform Engineering, overseeing platform infrastructure and software. A notable achievement during this period was her leadership in delivering the industry's first virtualized telco system to Deutsche Telekom in 2012. This milestone propelled Mavenir into a leadership position in Telco virtualization by 2016.

Tiago Silveira is an Associate Partner in McKinsey & Company’s Lisbon Office.

Relevant engagement experience
- Leader of Energy Efficiency for operators practice in McKinsey, having done numerous engagements across the globe
- Led multiple network strategy studies, for US, LATAM, European and Asian Telcos, including oRAN strategy, Edge strategy, 5G strategy
- Led multiple transformation projects in Network, Operations and Logistics. Focus areas: rents reduction, energy cost improvement (passive and active measures), contract renegotiation for repair and maintenance, network operation, customer field force productivity improvements, reduction of repair activities, stock optimization, improvement of logistic activities.
- Led multiple SD-WAN strategy studies with focus on operators
- Led a B2B strategy definition for European and LATAM telcos, including end to end portfolio review, channel strategy and operating model
- Led IT and Digital strategy studies for large enterprises, including Cloud migration, Agile and DevOps adoption and culture transformation

Background
- Tiago holds a PhD in Telecommunications Engineering from University of Aveiro and MBA from The Lisbon MBA.
- Before joining McKinsey, he worked 12 years in Telecom equipment vendors, such as Siemens, Nokia Siemens and Infinera. His last role was as a Director of Software Development for NFV and SDN.
- Tiago is a native Portuguese speaker, fluent in English, and has speaking level skills in Spanish.

Manglam Tewari is an Associate Partner in the Seattle office of McKinsey & Company. His efforts are concentrated on Telecommunications & Media, where he part of our global Operators practice, with particular focus on e2e Network value chain – across both Wireless and Fiber. He has also been involved in strategy and service operations projects in various industries.

Relevant Experience
- End to end Network transformation for leading telecom operator in North America to help them reduce network deployment costs by ~15% and significantly reduce their cycle times to improved their speed to market by ~30%.
- IT transformation for operator to rationalize their legacy applications and enterprise architecture and modernize the entire IT applications ecosystem
- Transformation of a Latin America operator to deploy their fix network at 10% lower costs with standardized materials, better vendor contracts and BOM automations
- Field force demand reduction and site visit streamlining for telcom operator
- Fiber design automation deployment for telco operators
- End to end digitized journey rollout for a telco OEM to reduce costs and improve speed to market

Director RIC product Management RAN intelligence, VMware
Education: Stanford University, Master’s Electrical and Electronics Engineering
Oregon State University, Bachelors, Electrical and Electronics Engineering

Sameer Vuyyuru joined AWS in 2020 as the Director Telco Business Development for Communication Service Providers, leading a worldwide team focused on transforming the way networks and network services are built and monetized in the future. Prior to AWS Sameer was the Co-Founder and CEO of Wayz.ai, a Shanghai based AI start-up. Previously he has also held SVP roles at Comtech and Semtech. Sameer holds an MSEE in Digital Signal Processing from Texas Tech University and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.

Sindhu Xirasagar is the Senior Director of RAN Software Solutions at Intel. She has over 20 years’ experience in Silicon and Software products enabling the Wireless industry. She is excited about the evolution of the industry to Open, virtualized, Intelligent RANs for operators to achieve Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings, meet sustainability goals and create value-added services. She is the Intel Business Representative in ORAN Alliance. Sindhu holds an MSEE from Michigan Technological University and an MBA from Lehigh University.

Ashish Yadav is the Head of Strategic Alliances and Technical Product Marketing, SFS, at Capgemini.

Ashish is a leader, speaker, and mentor. She lives by her values of passion and integrity. She has over 20+ years of experience in leading engineering organizations and handling Strategic partnerships for Start-ups and Fortune 500 global technology companies.

Previously, she served as AVP Engineering for the 5G wireless group at Altran, handling the delivery organization of a 200+ members team and 50+ customers.

She is passionate about diversity and is a Telecom Infra Project Diversity group committee member. Her passion is to help education for underprivileged children and help increase the impact of women in
tech.

She lives in California with her husband and teenage son. She loves reading and hiking. She volunteers for programs that help in education for underprivileged children.

Ms. Yadav has a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Sciences from Maharshi Dayanand University, India.

Dr. Sameh Yamany is the CTO of VIAVI Solutions, responsible for the company's technological direction and execution of its technology strategy. He previously served as the CEO and President of Trendium, which was acquired by JDSU in 2013.

In the industry, Dr. Yamany held a senior executive position at Tektronix Communications, guiding the development of the Iris suite for wireless and wireline monitoring. He has also been an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Dr. Yamany earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Louisville, USA, and has authored various patents, articles, and book chapters in fields like artificial intelligence, telecommunications, and biomedical engineering.