Alberto Leon-Garcia (Program Director)

Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto
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Alberto Leon-Garcia is Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. He was Scientific Director of the SAVI NSERC Strategic Network (with $8.5 million in funding from NSERC and industry partners), where he proposed multitier SDI cloud computing and led the deployment of the SAVI testbed. He is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto and previously held a a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair. He has been awarded the IEEE McNaughton Gold Medal, the Royal Society of Canada Eadie Medal, and the Engineering Institute of Canada Smith Medal. A Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the Engineering Institute of Canada, and the AAAS, he was also Founder and CTO of AcceLight Networks, a major start-up company in Ottawa. Leon-Garcia is renowned internationally as an educator, and his textbooks in communication networks and in probability and random processes are considered classics and are in use globally in English, and other languages. He has founded several highly successful training programs including the Nortel Network Engineering Program (1986–1995), the Master of Engineering in Telecommunications and the MET Executive Development Program (1996–2005), and the SAVI-MITACS internship program (2011–2016). Over 1000 graduates from these programs are employed in engineering and management positions in the ICT, and many telecom executives in Canada are NEP graduates. He will serve as NetSoft Program Director. He will lead the research and teaching on IoT multitier clouds.

Raouf Boutaba

Professor, David R. Sheraton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo
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Raouf Boutaba is Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science and the Associate Dean Research of the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. He holds a University of Waterloo Research Chair and an INRIA International Research Chair. He is a leading researcher in the management of communication networks and services with a current focus on network virtualization, SDN, NFV and cloud computing as the foundation for next generation information, network and service infrastructures. He has published extensively in these areas, holds several patents, and received several best paper awards and recognitions, including the IEEE’s Fred Ellersick Prize; the Hal Sobol, the Joe LoCicero, the Dan Stokesbury, the Salah Aidarous Awards, and the Donald W. McLellan Awards. He is the founding Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (2007-2010), currently serves as the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, and one of the founding steering committee members of the IEEE SDN initiative. He is a recipient of the IEEE McNaughton Gold Medal, a Fellow of the IEEE, the Engineering Institute of Canada, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He will lead the research and teaching in SDN.

Mohamed Cheriet

Professor, Génie de la production automatisée, École de Technologie Supérieure
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Mohamed Cheriet is Professor in Génie de la production automatisée at École de Technologie Supérieure, Montreal. He is among the very few researchers who have initiated and conducted major international initiatives ranging from ICT to human science. He has made fundamental contributions in data processing and recognition, cloud computing, and green ICT. He holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair. He was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal and the ÉTS Research Excellence Award. Cheriet has led a research team at the Synchromedia Lab building efficient training programs in cloud computing, smart cities, and sustainable ICT invarious R&D; projects collaborating with world-class corporations. His recent research includes green sustainable Telco Clouds that virtualize services, and characterization of the life cycle of carbon emissions in cloud computing. He led the CANARIE-funded GreenStar Network, the first computing cloud powered entirely by renewable energy. Cheriet will lead the research and teaching in software-defined cloud computing and data centers; context awareness and optimization for cloud, network, and application design; green ICT and sustainability provisioning for cloud-based applications in networked society.

Kim Khoa Nguyen

Assistant Professor, Génie de la production automatisée, École de Technologie Supérieure
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Kim Khoa Nguyen is Assistant Professor in Génie électrique at École de Technologie Supérieure, Montreal. He is the architect of the GreenStar Network and is involved in publishing standards for green ICT. He helped train the team at Inocybe Technologies, a major start-up in SDN platforms and cloud computing solutions. He holds several patents with Ericsson and Hyperchip and has published over 50 scientific papers in cloud computing, SDN, smart grids, router architecture, green ICT and M2M communications. He will conduct research and teaching in datacenters, green ICT, and sustainability.

Leslie Rusch

Professor, Génie électrique et génie informatique, Laval University
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Leslie A. Rusch received the B.S.E.E. degree (with honors) from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 1980 and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 1992 and 1994, respectively. She currently holds a Canada Research Chair in Communications Systems Enabling the Cloud in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Université Laval (UL), QC, Canada. She is Fellow of the IEEE and OSA and a member of the Centre for Optics, Photonics and Lasers at UL. Dr. Rusch has experience in defense, industrial and academic communications research. She was a communications project engineer for the Department of Defense from 1980-1990. While on leave from Université Laval, she spent two years (2001-2002) at Intel Corporation creating and managing a group researching new wireless technologies.
Prof. Rusch is the recipient of the IEEE Canada Fessenden award for Contributions to Telecommunications. She was an elected member of the Board of Governors of IEEE Photonics Society from 2015-2018. She has served on multiple technical program committees for major international conferences, and as an associate editor of the IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications Networks and the IEEE Communications Letters. Prof. Rusch has published over 135 articles in international journals (90% IEEE/OSA) with wide readership, and contributed to over 190 conferences. Her articles have been cited over 5700 times per Google Scholar.
Prof. Rusch has won numerous awards for graduate training, including the IEEE Canada Ham Award for Graduate Supervision. Her research interests include digital signal processing for coherent detection in optical communications using silicon photonic devices, spatial multiplexing using orbital angular momentum modes in fiber, radio over fiber and OFDM for passive optical networks; and in wireless communications, supporting 5G over passive optical networks and optimization of the optical/wireless interface in emerging cloud based computing networks.

Mohamed Faten Zhani

Associate Professor, Génie logiciel et des TI, École de Technologie Supérieure
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Mohamed Faten Zhani is Assistant Professor in Génie logiciel et des TI at École de Technologie Supérieure, Montreal. He was a researcher in the SAVI project before joining ÉTS. Faten has co-authored several high-impact book chapters and research papers published in renowned conferences and journals. He will conduct research and teaching in cloud computing, NFV, SDN, and energy-aware resource management in large-scale distributed systems.

Ali Tizghadam

Senior Research Associate, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto
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Ali Tizghadam is Senior Research Associate at the University of Toronto.