IEEE Conferences

Plenary Panel: The Role of Services in the 5G/6G Arena

Date/Time: Thursday July 14
17:30 - 18:50 CET (Barcelona)

The fifth generation (5G) wireless networks technologies support diverse vertical applications by connecting heterogeneous devices and machines, promising drastic improvements in terms of low latency, increased network capacity and enhanced system throughput. Despite all these advantages that 5G will bring about, there are still major challenges to be addressed, including decentralization, transparency, risks of data interoperability, and above all, network privacy and security vulnerabilities. On paper, Distributed Ledger Technologies provide a framework to effectively handle most challenges in 5G networks. The panel provides a forum to discuss recent developments in 5G services, focusing on the potential of key 5G technologies, including edge computing, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and M2M communications, spectrum management, virtualization, and resource management.

Panel Chair:

Gabriele Elia holds a PhD from the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy. He has been working for TIM since 1994. Within TIM's Technology Innovation division, he leads the Technological Scouting, Trend Analysis and Future Center group where medium-term trends in networks and software are highlighted; digital life; digitization of industries; big data, robotics and AI; trends from the world of science and innovation processes. He has always dealt with innovation in the technological sectors on the topics of IP services, media, fixed and mobile broadband applications, and more recently with Open Innovation initiatives, startup acceleration and construction of innovative research, training and entrepreneurship collaborations.

---

Panelists:

Franco Vatalaro is a full professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Rome "Tor Vergata". He was Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) where he taught the Satellite Networks course. He served as President of RADIOLABS (website: www.radiolabs.it), founded in 2001, which has carried out and carries out research projects funded by the European Commission and on behalf of numerous public and private. He was president of the Italian section of the IEEE (2010-2012).

---

Sami Muhaidat holds a PhD from the University of Waterloo, Ontario. He is currently a Full Profes-sor at Khalifa University, in the UAE. His research interests focus on communication theory with particular emphasis on the physical layer aspects of wireless communication networks, and on ma-chine learning applications in the field of wireless networks. Sami is currently an Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications. He served as a Senior Editor for IEEE Communications Letters, an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications, and an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. He is a member of Mohammed Bin Rashid Academy of scientists.

---

Ben Azvine holds a PhD in Intelligent Control Systems from Manchester University and an MBA from Imperial College, London. He is responsible for setting direction and strategy for security research, identifying innovation opportunities and leading a strong international team of researcher to develop new capabilities in collaboration with industrial and academic partners. Ben’s previous roles included leading the IT research centre and head of business intelligence and customer analytics research at BT Group Chief Technology Office. He joined BT in 1995 to lead a research programme to develop and exploit novel Artificial Intelligence technology to support next generation IT systems. Since then he has held senior, principal, chief research scientist posts at BT’s global R&D headquarters in Adastral Park, Ipswich.

---

Marco Anisetti is an Associate Professor at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. He received the Ph.D degree in Computer Science from the Università degli Studi di Milano in 2009. He is the winner of the GIRPR award for the best PhD thesis in 2010 and the winner of Chester Sall Award from IEEE Consumer Electronics Society in 2009. His research interests are in the area of Computational Intelligence and its application to the design and evaluation of complex systems and services. More in details, he has been investigating innovative solutions in the areas of Cloud and Web Service security assurance evaluation and software/service certification.

He is currently investigating the application of Big Data technologies to i) compute trustworthiness and assurance metrics in Cloud, Edge, IoT and for AI models, ii) provide analytics capabilities in continuum edge scenarios including 5G edge nodes. He participated in more than 10 EU projects including FP7 ASSET4SOA and FP7 CUMULUS, H2020 EVOTION, H2020 CONCORDIA, H2020 IMPETUS, H2020 CounteR to name but a few. The results of research activities have been published in more than 120 papers in international conference/workshop proceedings, journals, and chapters in books.