Mohamed-Slim Alouini was born in Tunis, Tunisia. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering
from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena,
CA, USA, in 1998. He served as a faculty member in the University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, MN, USA, then in the Texas A&M University at Qatar,
Education City, Doha, Qatar before joining King Abdullah University of
Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Makkah Province, Saudi
Arabia as a Professor of Electrical Engineering in 2009. His current
research interests include the modeling, design, and
performance analysis of wireless communication systems.

Ana García Armada is currently a Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, where she is
leading the Communications Research Group. She has participated in more than 30 national and 10
international research projects as well as 20 contracts with the industry. Her research has resulted in 9
book chapters, and more than 150 publications in international journals and conferences, as well as 5
patents. She has also contributed to standardization organizations (ITU, ETSI) and is a member of the
European 5G PPP Group of Experts, as well as the Spanish representative in the committee of the ESA
Joint Board on Communication Satellite Programs 5G Advisory Committee (5JAC). She has been Editor
(2016–2019, Exemplary Editor Award 2017 and 2018) and Area Editor (2019-2020, Exemplary Editor
Award 2020) of IEEE Communication Letters. She is Editor of IEEE Transactions on Communications since
2019, Area Editor of IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society since 2019, Editor of the ITU
Journal on Future and Evolving Technologies and is a regular member of the technical program
committees of the most relevant international conferences in his field. She has formed / is part of the
organizing committee of the IEEE Globecom 2019 and 2021 (General Chair), IEEE Vehicular Technology
Conference Spring 2018, 2019 and Fall 2018, IEEE 5G Summit 2017, among others. She is Secretary of
the IEEE ComSoc Signal Processing and Computing for Communications Committee, has been Secretary
and Chair of the IEEE ComSoc Women in Communications Engineering Standing Committee. Since
January 2020 she is Director of Online Content of the IEEE Communications Society. She has received
the Award of Excellence from the Social Council and the Award for Best Teaching Practices from
Universidad Carlos II de Madrid, as well as the third place Bell Labs Prize 2014, the Outstanding Service
Award 2019 from the SPCE committee of the IEEE Communications Society and the Outstanding Service
Award 2020 from the Women in Communications Engineering (WICE) standing committee.

Elizabeth M. Belding is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prof. Belding's research focuses on mobile and wireless networking, including network performance analysis, and information and communication technologies for development (ICTD). She is a co-developer of the AODV routing protocol for mobile networks, on which 802.11s and Zigbee technologies are based in part. The original AODV paper published in WMCSA'99 received the 2018 ACM SIGMOBILE Test of Time Award. Prof. Belding applies her wireless network expertise to a wide range of contexts, and is particularly interested in improving Internet and cellular accessibility in developing and resource-challenged communities worldwide. Her ICTD projects have included work in Zambia, South Africa, Mongolia, and refugee camps. Most recently, she has been working with Native American communities around the US. She is the founder and director of the Mobility Management and Networking (MOMENT) Laboratory. Prof. Belding is the author of over 150 technical papers on wireless networking and has served on over 80 conference technical program committees. She was Vice Chair of the UCSB Computer Science department 2009-15 and 2017-19. She is currently an Associate Dean and Faculty Equity Advisor in the UCSB College of Engineering. Prof. Belding is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, and a 2002 MIT Technology Review 100 award, awarded to the world’s top young investigators. She is an ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow and IEEE Fellow. She is particularly proud of receiving the UCSB Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award in 2012 and the NCWIT Harrold and Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring Award in 2015 for her mentorship of graduate students.

Brian Barritt is a software engineering manager at Facebook Connectivity where he supports Magma, an open-source software platform that gives network operators an open, flexible and extendable mobile core network solution. Magma’s mission is to connect the world to a faster network by enabling service providers to build cost-effective and extensible carrier-grade networks.

Prior to joining Facebook in August of this year, he was a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Alphabet. At Google he founded the Temporospatial Software Defined Networking infrastructure that powers Loon and other non-terrestrial networks. Dr. Barritt has more than 15 years of experience in

advanced wireless networks. Prior to joining Google in 2014, he led engineering programs at Cisco and for NASA's Space Communications and Navigation program.

Brian earned an MBA in Management of Technology & Innovation from the University of Minnesota and BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from Case Western Reserve University.

Widely known as a “Father of the Internet,” Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. In December 1997, President Bill Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his colleague, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet. In 2004, Cerf was the recipient of the ACM Alan M. Turing award (sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”) and in 2005 he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George Bush.

Cerf began his work at the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) playing a key role in leading the development of Internet and Internet-related data packet and security technologies. Since 2005, he has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google. In this role, he is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world.

Thomas Choi is the Executive Chairman of Airspace Internet Exchange (AIE) Inc, USA. He is a satellite entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the Satellite and Aerospace industry.

Prior to AIE, Tom founded ABS Global, a global satellite operator and Speedcast Ltd, a valued-added satellite service company that is a joint venture with AsiaSat. He also spent more than five years as a business development executive at Hughes Communications International and served as a technical staff member at Rockwell International.

He has a MBA and B.S. in Aerospace Engineering both from the University of Southern California.

Dr. Baris I. Erkmen has been active in the development of advanced optical
communication and sensing systems for over a decade. He is presently the Engineering Lead of a free-space optical communications project at X, focused on enabling global, abundant, and affordable connectivity. His past responsibilities include Principal Investigator
for NASA’s OPALS laser communication demonstration from the International Space Station (2009-2013), and Engineering Lead for Free-Space Optical Communications demonstrations on Project Loon (2013-2016). His focus encompasses application of both the classical
and quantum properties of light to enable better communication and sensing capabilities. Throughout his career, he has led and participated in projects that range from building field-deployed hardware (terrestrial, airborne, and spaceborne), to tabletop prototype
demonstrations, to investigations of novel approaches to communication and sensing.

Paul Garnett is an accomplished leader with over two decades of experience in telecommunications and technology law and policy, market development, business development, strategic alliances, and technology and business model incubation.

Paul has a proven track record developing creative, high return-on-investment approaches to large and complex challenges. He worked for seventeen years “inside the beltway” for a top management consulting firm, law firm, communications regulator, and trade association, and eleven years “outside the beltway” for one of the biggest technology companies in the world. Paul also conceived of, launched, and led Microsoft’s Airband Initiative, leveraging a partner-driven approach to extending broadband access to unserved communities in the U.S. and globally. Paul was also the founder and Chairman of the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance. Paul has extensive global business and government relations experience on five continents and has contributed to over twenty U.S. patents.

Prior to founding the Vernonburg Group, Paul was the Senior Director of Microsoft’s Airband Initiative. The Airband Initiative’s portfolio encompassed over 100 projects in 20 countries across 5 continents, where Paul and his team worked with internet service providers, energy access providers, and other partners to deploy new last-mile access technologies, cloud-based services, and business models that extended broadband internet access for tens of millions of people. Paul and his team also focused on key enabling verticals such as agriculture, education, healthcare, and small business.

Andrea Goldsmith is currently the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. She was previously the Stephen Harris professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford until her retirement in 2020, where she is now the Harris Professor emerita. She joined Stanford as a faculty member in Electrical Engineering in 1999. Her research interests are in information theory, communication theory, and signal processing, and their application to wireless communications, interconnected systems, and neuroscience. She co-founded and served as Chief Technical Officer and Board member of Plume WiFi and of Quantenna (QTNA), and she currently serves on the Board of Directors for Medtronic (MDT) and Crown Castle Inc. (CCI). She has also been a member or chair of the technical advisory boards for Quantenna (QTNA), Sequans (SQNS), Interdigital (IDCC) and Cohere. Goldsmith has launched and led several multi-university research projects including DARPA’s ITMANET program, and she is currently a Principal Investigator in the NSF Center on the Science of Information. Prior to Stanford she held positions at Caltech, Maxim Technologies, Memorylink Corporation, and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Dr. Goldsmith is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the IEEE and of Stanford, and has received several awards for her work, including the Marconi Prize, the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Technical Field Award in Communications Technology, the IEEE Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award, the ComSoc Edwin H. Armstrong Achievement Award as well as Technical Achievement Awards in Communications Theory and in Wireless Communications, the National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Lecture Award, and the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal’s Women of Influence Award. She is author of the book ``Wireless Communications'' and co-author of the books ``MIMO Wireless Communications'' and “Principles of Cognitive Radio,” all published by Cambridge University Press, as well as an inventor on 29 patents. She has served in various leadership roles in the IEEE and in industrial groups aimed at diversifying STEM fields, and is currently the founding chair of the IEEE Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Professional Ethics. At Stanford she has served as chair and a member of the Faculty Senate and on the Planning and Policy Board, Committee on Research, Commissions on Graduate Education and on Undergraduate Education, Task Force on Women and Leadership, and the Faculty Women's Forum Steering Committee. She currently serves on Stanford's Budget Group, Advisory Board, and in the Faculty Senate.

Ida is a lawyer by profession with a master’s degree with Merit in law from the University of London: LLM Hons. She has been a Regulator in the Gambia, her native country for four years, A regulatory specialist in Zain/ Airtel in Sierra Leone for 3 years and with the ITU since 2012 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

​She started as a Senior Project Coordinator of the HIPSSA project, an ITU\EU 14-million-euro project on the Harmonization of policies and legal frameworks in the ICT markets in Sub Saharan Africa. She became a program coordinator of the ITU Regional office for Africa. She is now the ITU Senior Liaison Officer to United Nations.

She has two daughters and a son. She is passionate about gender equality, Girls and Women in Tech, female empowerment and leadership, women, and children rights.

Dr. Tawfik Jelassi was appointed UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information on 1st July 2021. In this position, he is responsible for the Organization’s
programmes on building inclusive knowledge societies, leading digital transformation, strategizing the role of ICT in education, and fostering freedom of expression.
Dr. Jelassi holds a Ph.D. doctorate in information systems from New York University (USA) and postgraduate diplomas from the University of Paris Dauphine (France).
Dr. Jelassi has extensive experience in higher education, scientific research, and information & communication technologies. He held academic, corporate and government leadership positions in Europe, the USA, and Tunisia.
Among others, he was Programme Director and Professor of Strategy and Technology Management at IMD Business School in Lausanne (2015 – June 2021). Prior to that, he served as Minister of Higher education, Scientific Research and Information & Communication Technologies in the democratic transition government of Tunisia (2014 – 2015). Prior appointments included being Chairman of the Board of Directors of Ooredoo Telecom in Tunisia, Dean at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (Paris), and Professor & Chairman
of the Technology Management Department at INSEAD (Fontainebleau).

Helka-Liina has been contributing to 3GPP standardization since more than 10 years. Her research topics have included MIMO, Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP), interference management, LTE-WLAN interworking, Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS), 5G New Radio (NR) mobility, Aerials and NR connectivity via satellites.

She served as rapporteur for the Enhanced LTE Support for Aerial Vehicles work item in 3GPP Release-15 (2018).

She is a co-author of the books “5G New Radio: A Beam-based Air Interface” Wiley, published in April 2020 and “UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond”, Wiley, published in December 2020. She has also been an invited speaker and panelist at conferences and workshops organized by research, regulatory, and standardization associations.

Helka-Liina holds a Ph.D. degree in communications engineering from the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.

Milo Medin has been part of the Internet development community for more than 25 years. He is currently the vice president of wireless services at Alphabet, where he oversees the company’s Gigabit Fiber to the Home project and other efforts to improve access to the Internet.

Prior to joining Google in 2010, he was founder and CTO of M2Z Networks, a company that sought to deploy a national broadband wireless network system that will expand consumer network access by providing nationwide portable broadband service that was also to help bridge the digital divide. He was co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer of Excite@Home, where he led the development of the company’s national infrastructure, and helped deliver the first large scale residential broadband access service in partnership with major cable operators. Earlier, Milo worked at NASA’s Ames Research Center, where he managed the primary west coast interconnect for the Internet, and architected and managed the global NASA Science Internet. Before NASA, while enrolled at UC Berkeley, he worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, programming high performance computers in support of various Defense Programs.

Milo studied computer science at UC Berkeley. He has participated in a number of public policy forums, including two National Academy of Sciences panels and a variety of TechNet initiatives, and given testimony in Congress and before the Federal Communications Commission on Broadband technology policy. He has received two patents in the field of network access technology.

Dr. Anton Monk is CTO of Wireless Initiatives at Viasat, Inc, a global provider of high-speed satellite broadband services and secure networking systems. At Viasat, he helps bring broadband internet service to unserved international rural communities, working at the intersection of technology, spectrum policy, and business partnerships. Before that he was VP of technology strategy, business development and partnerships at XCOM Labs, which develops innovative wireless technologies in new 5G verticals such as industrial robotics & automation and multiuser AR/VR. Previously, he was VP of Strategic Alliances and Standards at Cohere Technologies, which developed a groundbreaking wireless modulation technique for next generation 5G cellular communications. He was a co-founder & held the roles of VP & CTO of Entropic Communications, a publicly traded semiconductor company that invented the MoCA home networking solution used by Pay TV service providers for multi-room DVR throughout the U.S. He holds more than 25 granted patents. Prior to co-founding Entropic he was involved in the development of cable, satellite and wireless integrated circuits at Conexant and ComStream Corporation and was a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He sits on various industry, advisory and academic boards, including Hearing Lab Technology, the Wireless Broadband Alliance, and the UCSD Jacobs School Dean’s Council of Advisors. Dr. Monk earned a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology and B.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego.

Edward is known for developing decision-support models of digital infrastructure, having carried out 5G assessments for countries around the world. His work provides evidence on effective strategies to connect more people to a faster internet. Such information is vital for ensuring sustainable economic development as most new technologies require internet connectivity. The open-source 5G assessment software he has developed has been used to support national and international policy decisions.

Edward’s research is highly multi-disciplinary, drawing on analytical techniques from engineering and computer science, to answer new questions pertaining to policy, innovation, planning, economics, and sustainable development. Other research interests include developing novel risk analysis methods and applying them to understand vulnerabilities relating to cyber-attacks and space hazards.

Having been awarded over $800k in research funding, Edward has led many projects for organizations including the World Bank, Facebook Connectivity Lab, Oxford Economics, AIG, the Canadian Space Agency, Airbus Space and Defence, Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, HM Treasury’s National Infrastructure Commission, UK Department for Transport and the UK Met Office.

In 2017 he was nominated by the US Embassy for the International Visitors Leadership Program based on his digital infrastructure research. Edward holds an MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge and completed a post-doc at the Cambridge Judge Business School. Prior to GMU he was a Senior Research Associate at the University of Oxford where he retains an Honorary position.

Ruth Pritchard-Kelly is an expert on satellite regulatory policy with over 30 years of experience. She is
currently the principal at RPK Advisors, and before that was the Vice President of Regulatory Affairs for
OneWeb where she oversaw a global team of legal & technical policy analysts who worked on satellite
policies internationally. Pritchard-Kelly has also worked at O3b, now SES Networks, and American
Mobile Satellite Corporation. She has a Master’s Degree in space and telecommunications policy from
George Washington University and a J.D. from the University of Maryland. Ms. Pritchard-Kelly is on the
US Commerce Department’s Spectrum Management Advisory Committee, and the board of the Arthur
C. Clarke Foundation.

Ken Riordan is the President of the HAPS Alliance. The HAPS Alliance unites companies from telecommunications, technology, aviation and aerospace industries to eliminate the digital divide and bring connectivity to more people, places and things worldwide by accelerating the promotion of high altitude platform stations (HAPS) in the stratosphere. Ken is also Head of Product Management, Connectivity Solutions, at Loon LLC, an Alphabet Company.

Previously, Riordan held engineering, product development and business management roles at Nokia and Motorola. During his career, he has developed products focused on mobile devices and network equipment and worked to launch networks that span the full history of cellular communications standards, including AMPS, GSM, CDMA, WiMAX, LTE and 5G. Riordan served on the Executive Board of the Small Cell Forum and as Technical Committee Chair and Forum Vice-chair for the Wireless Innovation Forum (formerly SDR Forum). He has been a contributor to 3GPP and has supported regulatory and export control policy development for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Department of Commerce (DOC). Riordan holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.