Panel of Speakers in Alphabetic Order
Erdal Arikan (Bilkent University)
Erdal Arikan has been a member of the facuty at the Electrical-Electronics Engineering Department, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey since 1987. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, in 1985. His main research interests are in error correction coding. For his work on polar coding, he was awarded the 2010 IEEE Information Theory Society Best Paper Award, the 2013 IEEE W. R. G. Baker Award, the 2018 IEEE Hamming Medal, and the 2019 Shannon Speaker award. He is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences.
Emil Björnson (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
Emil Björnson is a Professor of Wireless Communication at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. He is an IEEE Fellow, Digital Futures Fellow, and Wallenberg Academy Fellow. He has a podcast and YouTube channel called Wireless Future. His research focuses on multi-antenna communications and radio resource management, using methods from communication theory, signal processing, and machine learning. He has authored three textbooks and has published a large amount of simulation code. He has received the 2018 and 2022 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Awards in Wireless Communications, the 2019 EURASIP Early Career Award, the 2019 IEEE Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize, the 2019 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Column Award, the 2020 Pierre-Simon Laplace Early Career Technical Achievement Award, the 2020 CTTC Early Achievement Award, and the 2021 IEEE ComSoc RCC Early Achievement Award. He also received six Best Paper Awards at conferences.
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Maurizio Burla (Technische Universität Berlin)
Maurizio Burla (S’08-M’12-SM'22) received his received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees (cum laude) from the University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy, in 2005 and 2007, respectively, and his PhD degree (cum laude) from the University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands in 2013. From 2012 to 2015 he has been a FQRNT Research fellow at INRS-EMT, Montreal, Canada, working on integrated-waveguide technologies for ultrafast all-optical signal processing and microwave photonics. In 2015 he moved to the Institute of Electromagnetic Fields, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, to work on microwave plasmonics and THz wireless communications. From 2017 to 2021 he led an SNF Ambizione project at ETH during which he demonstrated plasmonic modulators with record bandwidth and used them to realize high-dynamic range analog optical links operating at sub-THz frequencies with bandwidths in excess of 100 GHz. Since 2022 he has been the Chair of the High Frequency Technologies and Photonics at TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Prof. Burla received several best paper awards at the IEEE International Topical Meeting on Microwave Photonics for his research contributions on programmable integrated photonic and plasmonic devices for sub-THz signal processing.
Gerhard P. Fettweis (Technische Universität Dresden)
Gerhard P. Fettweis earned his Ph.D. under H. Meyr's supervision from RWTH Aachen in 1990. After one year at IBM Research in San Jose, CA, he moved to TCSI Inc., Berkeley, CA. Since 1994 he is Vodafone Chair Professor at TU Dresden, Germany, with 20 companies from Asia/Europe/US sponsoring his research on wireless transmission and chip design. He coordinates 2 DFG centers at TU Dresden, namely cfaed and HAEC, and the 5G Lab Germany. Gerhard is IEEE Fellow, member of the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), the German Academy of Engineering (acatech), and received multiple IEEE recognitions. In Dresden his team has spun-out fifteen start-ups, and setup funded projects in volume of close to EUR 1/2 billion. He has helped organizing IEEE conferences, most notably as TPC Chair of ICC 2009 and of TTM 2012, and as General Chair of VTC Spring 2013 and DATE 2014.
Marios Kountouris (EURECOM, France)
Marios Kountouris is a Professor at the Communication Systems department, EURECOM, France. He received the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece in 2002, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Télécom Paris, France in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Prior to his current appointment, he has held positions at CentraleSupélec, France, Huawei Paris Research Center, France, The University of Texas at Austin, USA, and Yonsei University, S. Korea. He has received several awards and distinctions, including the Blondel Medal 2022, the 2016 IEEE ComSoc CTTC Early Achievement Award, the 2013 IEEE ComSoc Outstanding EMEA Young Researcher Award, and the 2012 IEEE SPS Signal Processing Magazine Award. He has served as Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and the IEEE Wireless Communication Letters.
Thomas Kürner (Technische Universität Braunschweig)
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Thomas Kürner (Fellow IEEE) received his Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1990, and his Dr.-Ing. degree in 1993, both from University of Karlsruhe (Germany). From 1990 to 1994 he was with the Institut für Höchstfrequenztechnik und Elektronik (IHE) at the University of Karlsruhe working on wave propagation modelling, radio channel characterization and radio network planning. From 1994 to 2003, he was with the radio network planning department at the headquarters of the GSM 1800 and UMTS operator E-Plus Mobilfunk GmbH & Co KG, Düsseldorf, where he was team manager radio network planning support responsible for radio network planning tools, algorithms, processes and parameters from 1999 to 2003. Since 2003 he is Full University Professor for Mobile Radio Systems at the Technische Universität Braunschweig. In 2012 he was a guest lecturer at Dublin City University within the Telecommunications Graduate Initiative in Ireland. Currently he is chairing the IEEE 802.15 Standing Committee THz. He was also the chair of IEEE 802.15.3d TG 100G, which developed the worldwide first wireless communications standard operating at 300 GHz. He was the project coordinator of the H2020-EU-Japan project ThoR (“TeraHertz end-to-end wireless systems supporting ultra-high data Rate applications”) and is Coordinator of the German DFG-Research Unit FOR 2863 Meteracom (“Metrology for THz Communications”). In 2019 and 2022 he received the Neal-Shephard Award of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) and also in 2022 the Best Teacher Award of the European School on Antennas and Propagation (ESoA).
Petar Popovski (Aalborg University)
Petar Popovski is a Professor at Aalborg University, where he heads the section on Connectivity and a Visiting Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen. He received his Dipl.-Ing (1997) and M. Sc. (2000) degrees in communication engineering from the University of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje and the Ph.D. degree (2005) from Aalborg University. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He received an ERC Consolidator Grant (2015), the Danish Elite Researcher award (2016), IEEE Fred W. Ellersick prize (2016), IEEE Stephen O. Rice prize (2018), Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Technical Committee on Smart Grid Communications (2019), the Danish Telecommunication Prize (2020) and Villum Investigator Grant (2021). He is currently an Editor-in-Chief of IEEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, Vice-Chair of the IEEE Communication Theory Technical Committee and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GREEN COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKING. He was a Member at Large at the Board of Governors in IEEE Communication Society, as well as the General Chair for IEEE SmartGridComm 2018 and IEEE Communication Theory Workshop 2019. His research interests are in the area of wireless communication and communication theory. He authored the book ``Wireless Connectivity: An Intuitive and Fundamental Guide'', published by Wiley in 2020.
Slawomir Stanczak (Technische Universität Berlin and Fraunhofer HHI)
Slawomir Stanczak is Professor of Network Information Theory at the Technical University of Berlin and Head of the Wireless Communications and Networks Department at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI). Prof. Stanczak is co-author of two books and more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers in the field of information theory, wireless communications, signal processing, and machine learning. Prof. Stanczak received research grants from the German Research Foundation and the Best Paper Award from the German Society for Telecommunications in 2014. He was an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing from 2012 to 2015 and chair of the ITU-T Focus Group on Machine Learning for Future Networks including 5G from 2017 to 2020. Since 2020 Prof. Stanczak is chairman of the 5G Berlin association and since 2021 he is coordinator of the projects 6G-RIC (Research & Innovation Cluster) and CampusOS.
Wen Tong (CTO, Wireless Network, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.)
Dr. Wen Tong is the CTO, Huawei Wireless. He is the head of Huawei wireless research. In 2011, Dr. Tong was appointed the Head of Communications Technologies Labs of Huawei, currently, he is the Huawei 5G chief scientist and leads Huawei’s 10-year-long 5G wireless technologies research and development. Prior to joining Huawei in 2009, Dr. Tong was the Nortel Fellow and head of the Network Technology Labs at Nortel. He joined the Wireless Technology Labs at Bell Northern Research in 1995 in Canada. Dr. Tong is the industry recognized leader in invention of advanced wireless technologies, Dr. Tong was elected as a Huawei Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. He was the recipient of IEEE Communications Society Industry Innovation Award in 2014, and IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Industry Leader Award for “pioneering technical contributions and leadership in the mobile communications industry and innovation in 5G mobile communications technology” in 2018. He is also the recipient of R.A. Fessenden Medal. For the past three decades, he had pioneered fundamental technologies from 1G to 5G wireless and Wi-Fi with more than 480 granted US patents. Dr. Tong is a Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering, and he serves as Board of Director of Wi-Fi Alliance.
Sergio Verdú
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Sergio Verdu is an information theorist recipient of the Claude E Shannon Award in 2007
and the 2008 Richard W. Hamming Medal, as well as several paper awards from the IEEE.
He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering of the United States.