Section News

Watch Again | Section Meeting Panel Discussion – Future Directions of Communications: Vision, Standards and Requirements

About the event

Pervasive communications, built on the foundations of standards providing multi-vendor interoperability, continue to transform our daily lives. This panel discusses the current and future direction of wired and wireless communications technologies, their supporting standardisation activities, and their requirement.

The panel event was part of the Autumn Section meeting held at the BT Tower, London on 26th October 2021.

Moderator: Toktam Mahmoodi, Professor of Communication Engineering at King’s College London

Panellists

  • Maziar Nekovee : What comes beyond 5G and leads to 6G? What would be the role of AI?
  • Adrian Sharples : Connecting for good: Network Futures
  • David Law : Don’t forget the wires
  • Stephen McCann : Bridging the gap with Wi-Fi

Biographies

Toktam Mahmoodi is a professor of communication Engineering and Director of the Centre for Telecommunications Research (CTR) in Department of Engineering at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the areas of mobile and cloud networking, and includes autonomous network management, edge-intelligence, and ultra-low latency networking. She also works on applications of mobile communications in the healthcare, smart cities, emergency services, industrial networks and intelligent transportation.

Maziar Nekovee is Dean of the AI Institute and Managing Director of the newly established 6G Lab (https://6g-lab.org) at University of Sussex, UK. His current research focuses on AI, (sub) THz communication and reconfigurable Intelligent meta-surfaces for beyond 5G/6G, and the applications of 5G/6G and AI in health, automotive, and more recently aerospace sectors. Prior to joining University of Sussex in 2017, he was Head of Samsung’s European research and collaboration in 5G, where he contributed to development and standardisation of novel access technologies for 5G New Radio operating in millimeterwave frequencies.

Prior to Samsung he was with BT Research, where he worked on a range of fixed and wireless technologies, as well as working with BT’s spectrum strategy and lines of business teams. Maziar has a PhD in Physics from University of Nijmegen and a first degree (cum laude) in EEE from Delft University of Technology, both in the Netherlands. He is chair of NetWorld Europe Technology Platform, WG on Enabling Technologies for Future Vertical Ecosystem Transformation (https://www.networldeurope.eu/enabling-technologies-for-future-vertical-ecosystem-transformation/).

Adrian Sharples is the Senior Wireless Research Manager at BT Laboratories, leading a team of researchers to investigate the opportunities for applying new wireless techniques to mobile and fixed communications. He has over 30 years’ experience working on telecommunications access technologies in both technical and strategy roles. Adrian has a PhD in telecommunications and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Kent. He is a Chartered Engineer and a Member of the IET.

David Law is a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). David has worked on the specification and development of Ethernet products since 1989 including the development of Ethernet adapter cards, the first stackable Ethernet repeaters, stackable Ethernet switches, as well as being the technical lead on ASIC development teams for stackable repeaters and switching chipsets. Throughout this time David has been a member of the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Working Group.

David currently serves as IEEE 802.3 Chair, having served as IEEE 802.3 Vice Chair from 1996 to March 2008. David currently also serves as a member of the IEEE-Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Standards Board and Chair of the IEEE-SA Patent Committee (PatCom). David has a BEng (Hons) from Strathclyde University.

Stephen McCann is a Distinguished Engineer at Huawei. Stephen has 29 years of experience in the telecoms industry both in WLAN standardisation and IP innovation. Stephen is Secretary of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN standards organization since 2006 and Vice-Chair of both the IEEE P802.11bc broadcast services and IEEE P802.11bi enhanced data privacy groups. Stephen previously chaired the IEEE P802.11aq “Pre-association Discovery” project and its corresponding program within the Wi-Fi Alliance “Pre-association Infrastructure Discovery”. Stephen has a BSc (Hons) from the University of Birmingham.