Board

Jochen Appel is the Vice President, Tribe Leader Fixed and Mobile Data Platforms at Deutsche Telekom Technik in Germany. In this role he is leading the development of Deutsche Telekom’s software-defined Gigabit access network. In a dual role, Jochen is also responsible as Vice President at Deutsche Telekom’s International Technology organization for driving technology optimization programs aimed at delivering radically more cost efficient and better networks on a group wide level.

Jochen has been with Deutsche Telekom for over 20 years. After joining the company’s corporate R&D in 1996 he was involved in architecting and developing DT’s broadband IP network. He helped building up DT’s Silicon Valley based technology innovation group and has lead several organizations in the areas of product development, systems integration and technology transformation internationally and in Germany.

Jochen is a graduate in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt, Germany.

Victor Bahl is a technical fellow and chief technology officer of Azure for Operators in Microsoft’s Strategic Missions and Technologies (SMT) division. Prior to his current role, Dr. Bahl was the founding director of networking research at Microsoft and a member of the senior leadership team in Microsoft Research. With over 30 years of industry experience. Dr. Bahl advises Microsoft’s CEO and senior leadership team on long-term strategy related to 5G, edge computing, cloud infrastructures, networked systems, mobile computing and wireless systems. He is the original inventor of the edge computing architecture and thought leader behind Microsoft’s edge computing products. He is also the key leader of the strategy that led to the creation of Azure for Operators business.

Dr. Bahl has delivered numerous foundational technologies to Azure, XBOX and Windows that span industry shaping new datacenter architectures, new networking protocols and optimizations, new network management systems and new consumer experiences.  His technical contribution and advocacy of dynamic spectrum access led to the United States FCC opening up 180 MHz of spectrum for unlicensed use. He has published over 125 papers with over 57,000 citations; he is the author/co-author of 175 patents, and for his professional and research leadership has received numerous prestigious awards including four lifetime achievement awards, three distinguished alumni awards and four U.S. government national technology awards. He is the founder/co-founder of ACM SIGMOBILE, MobiSys, GetMobile and several other important conferences and journals. He serves on the advisory board of national research institutes, university departments, and non-profits. Dr. Bahl is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.

Andre oversees the global technology direction for AT&T. This includes network planning, the company’s innovation road map, AT&T Labs, AT&T Foundry, and the intellectual property organization. His responsibilities include spearheading the design of the company’s next-generation 5G wireless infrastructure and software-defined networking (SDN) initiative.

He’s also heavily involved in AT&T’s push into open source software and other open standards, and engagement and collaboration with the broader developer community.

Since joining AT&T in 1995, Andre has supported and led several organizations responsible for software, systems, and network architecture, planning and engineering, where he holds six patents in the field of network traffic optimization and database design.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at U.C. Berkeley and completed his graduate coursework in Computer Science at Stanford University.

Dai Kashiwa is the Vice president of SDN/NFV technology development at NTT Communications, where he leads a number of incubation and software development projects using SDN/NFV technologies.

After he joined NTT, he was involved in research including network management systems, network security, Active Networks, and received his Ph.D. in 2003. Since 2004, he has worked for NTT Communications, where he developed business network services including video broadcasting, dynamic VPN and SDN services.

Yusuf Kıraç is Chief Technology Officer of Turk Telekom. He graduated in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Hacettepe University in 1994. Following his undergraduate studies, in 1996 he started working as a manager in planning and integration management at Siemens and Nokia Siemens Networks. Mr. Kıraç started to work in Türk Telekom in 2008, taking part in the team that carried out the successful transformation projects in Türk Telekom’s All IP Architecture with Rural Transformation, Türk Telekom NGN and Fiber Transformation projects. In 2010, he assumed the role of Network Director and led many projects that gave profitability and capacity to Türk Telekom such as Fiberkentt, DWDM, MPLS, DC Conversion and TTVPN. In addition to his current role, he also chaired the NANI Working Group of ETNO, European Telecommunication Operators Organization, headquartered in Brussels, between 2010 and 2014.

In his managerial role at ETNO, he worked closely with international organizations such as the European Commission, CoCom, ECC, ITU, ETSI, ICANN and RIPE for numbering and addressing issues; migrating from IPv4 to IPv6, number portability, and M2M’s future strategies and policies. After the integration of Türk Telekom, Avea and TTNet, he served as Core & Transport Network Director. He has also been a board member of ESB (Access Providers Association) since 2015. Yusuf Kıraç served as Türk Telekom International General Manager since December 2016.

Dan has been a technical and executive leader in the computer and networking industries for over 35 years.   Currently, he leads the NetInfra team at Google, which is responsible for all cluster and host networking software for Google’s data centers.   Over his career, he co-founded and led engineering teams at three successful start-ups and worked at major companies such as Cisco, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, Intel and Apple.   Before rejoining Google (he had a short stint as the VP of Platforms back in 2005), he was most recently at Intel which had acquired Barefoot Networks where Dan was a co-founder.   Barefoot produced a line of high-performance programmable switch chips and software that use the P4 language.  Barefoot was collaborating with Google on P4, P4-Runtime and most recently PINS.

Dan’s interest and experience are in leading-edge software and hardware designs that push the state-of-the-art in distributed systems, networking and fault-tolerance.   Some of the major projects Dan has led include:

• Cisco’s UCS blade server line that featured network-controlled virtual server identity and configuration through the Virtualized Interface Card smart NIC and associated software.

• Cisco’s CRS-1 multi-chassis core router and distributed IOS-XR network operating system.

• Silicon Graphics’ Origin Supercomputer that supported up to 1000 processors sharing cache-coherent shared memory

• Stanford’s DASH cc-numa computer which was the basis of his PhD dissertation under John Hennessey

Outside of work, Dan likes to spend time with his wife and his three 20-something kids, running (26 marathons and counting), biking, hiking, scuba diving, traveling and nerding out on high-tech gadgets.

Guru Parulkar is VP, Networking & Edge (NEX), Intel; ONF Emeritus Board Member; Executive Director of Stanford Platform Lab; and Consulting Professor of EE at Stanford University.

Guru has been in the field of networking for over 25 years. He joined Stanford in 2007 as Executive Director of its Clean Slate Internet Design Program. At Stanford Guru helped create three programs: OpenFlow / Software-Defined Networking, Programmable Open Mobile Internet 2020, and Stanford Experimental Data Center Laboratory.

Prior to Stanford, Guru spent four years at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and worked with the broader research community to create programs such as GENI, Future Internet Design, and Network of Sensor Systems. Guru received NSF Director’s award for Program Management excellence.

Before NSF Guru founded several startups including Growth Networks (acquired by Cisco) and Sceos (IPO’d as Ruckus Wireless). Guru served as Entrepreneur in Residence at NEA in 2001 and received NEA’s Entrepreneurship Award.

Prior to this Guru spent over 12 years at Washington University in St. Louis where he was a Professor of Computer Science, Director of Applied Research Laboratory and the head of research and prototyping of high performance networking and multimedia systems.

Guru received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Delaware in 1987. Guru is a recipient of the Alumni Outstanding Achievement award and the Frank A. Pehrson Graduate Student Achievement award.