NeTS-VO Virtual Coffee Chat

Sponsored by the NeTS-VO


April 29, 2022

10:00AM – 11:30AM Pacific Time, 1:00PM – 2:30PM Eastern Time


You have questions. We have folks who may have answers! Join our virtual “coffee chat”.

Registration link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe8gBHGMFo5HAlQs8jxG08fjsu9rvGMQx1X_O1nI7MXYMy4vw/viewform?usp=sf_link

We will have several no-host breakout rooms with the following topics:

  • Cross-layer
  • Network Layer and up
  • Physical Layer
  • Spectrum Issues
  • Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence for Wireless communications
  • Career Issues

NeTS-VO will facilitate the break-out rooms.

Our special guests are:

  • Ana García Armada ( Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
  • John Cioffi  (Stanford University and ASSIA, Inc.)
  • Elza Erkip (NYU)
  • Monisha Ghosh (University of Notre Dame)
  • Miriam Leeser (Northeastern University)
  • Alberto Leon-Garcia (University of Toronto)
  • George Sklivanitis (Florida Atlantic University)

Come for an informal session where you can join topic-oriented break-out rooms and ask questions of our guests and your peers!


About the Speakers
Ana García Armada

Ana García Armada is currently a Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. She is leading the Communications Research Group at this university. 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 prestigious 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.

John Cioffi

Illinois-BSEE: 1978, Stanford-PhDEE: 1984; Prof. EE, Stanford, 1986-present, now recalled emeritus.   Founder Amati 1991 (1997 purchased by TI); Chairman and CEO ASSIA Inc.  Cioffi’s specific interests are in the area of high-performance digital transmission. Awards include IEEE AG Bell (2010), Kirchmayer (2014) and Millennium Medals; Member Internet (2014) and Consumer-Electronics (2018) Halls of Fame; Marconi Fellow (2006); Member, US National (2001) and UK Royal (2009) Engineering Academies.  Has served over a dozen boards of directors, presently PhyTunes (Chairman), Marconi Society (Vice-Chairman), Tinoq. 800+ papers and 150+ heavily licensed patents.


Elza Erkip

Elza Erkip an Institute Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at New York University Tandon School of Engineering. She received the B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.  Her research interests are in information theory, communication theory, and wireless communications. 

Dr. Erkip is a member of the Science Academy of Turkey, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. She received the NSF CAREER award in 2001, the IEEE Communications Society WICE Outstanding Achievement Award in 2016, the IEEE Communications Society Communication Theory Technical Committee (CTTC) Technical Achievement Award in 2018, and the IEEE Communications Society Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award in 2021. Her paper awards include the IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Paper Prize in 2004,  the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication in 2013 and  the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 2019. She was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society 2012-2020, where she was the President in 2018. She was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 2013 to 2014.  


Monisha Ghosh

Monisha Ghosh will be joining the University of Notre Dame as a Professor in the Electrical Engineering department in January 2022. She is currently a Research Professor at the University of Chicago where she conducts research on wireless networks, with an emphasis on spectrum sharing and coexistence. She was on a leave of absence from January 2020 – June 2021, serving as the CTO of the FCC where she helped craft the rules for the 6 GHz unlicensed band and was instrumental in the design and execution of the broadband mapping pilot with the USPS, and from September 2017 – December 2019 at NSF where she helped manage the wireless research portfolio and create the joint NSF/Intel Machine Learning for Wireless Networks Program. Prior to joining academia in 2015, she spent 24 years in industry, at Philips Research, Bell Labs and Interdigital. She obtained her B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur and Ph.D. from USC. She is a Fellow of the IEEE.


Miriam Leeser

Miriam Leeser is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University.  She has been doing research in hardware accelerators, including FPGAs and GPUs, for decades, and has done ground breaking research in floating point implementations, unsupervised learning, medical imaging and privacy preserving data processing.  She received her BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and Diploma and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from Cambridge University in England.  She has been a faculty member at Northeastern since 1996, where she is head of the Reconfigurable Computing Laboratory and a member of the Computer Engineering group.  She is a senior member of ACM, IEEE and SWE.  Throughout her career she has been funded by both government agencies and companies, including DARPA, NSF, Google, MathWorks and Microsoft. She is the recipient of an NSF Young Investigator Award and the prestigious Fulbright Scholar Award.


Alberto Leon-Garcia

Alberto Leon-Garcia is Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto.  He is a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electronics an Electrical Engineering “For contributions to multiplexing and switching of integrated services traffic”. He authored the textbooks: Probability and Random Processes for Electrical Engineering, and Communication Networks: Fundamental Concepts and Key Architecture.  Leon-Garcia was Founder and CTO of AcceLight Networks in Ottawa from 1999 to 2002.  He was Scientific Director of the NSERC Strategic Network for Smart Applications on Virtual Infrastructures (SAVI), and Principal Investigator of the project on Connected Vehicles and Smart Transportation.  SAVI designed and deployed a national testbed in Canada that converges cloud computing and software-defined networking.  CVST designed and deployed an application platform for smart transportation. Leon-Garcia was Founder of StreamWorx.ai which developed massive-scale, real-time streaming analytics software for network operations and cybersecurity applications.


George Sklivanitis

Dr. George Sklivanitis is a Research Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University, a faculty founding member of the FAU Center for Connected Autonomy and AI (ca-ai.fau.edu) and a faculty fellow with the FAU Institute for Sensing and Embedded Network Systems Engineering. His research focuses on modeling, optimization and experimental evaluation of advanced wireless communication systems (from kHz to sub-THz) and autonomy in challenging, congested (and sometimes contested) communication environments. He has made leading contributions in the design and implementation of software-defined radio testbeds for cognitive wireless communications and adaptive high-speed underwater acoustic networks. In October 2018, he co-founded ExtremeComms Lab Inc. -a Venture Class 6 startup at FAU Tech Runway- that focuses on the development of a new class of ocean IoT platforms that can self-position and self-network underwater. George received his Diploma in electrical and computer engineering from the Technical University of Crete, Greece, in 2010, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo, NY, USA, in 2018.

In 2014, he ranked 1st among all U.S. Universities in the Nutaq Software-Defined Radio Academic U.S. National Contest and in 2015 he received the Best Demo Award in the 10th ACM International Conference on Underwater Networks and Systems. He was also a recipient of the 2015 SUNY Buffalo Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Teaching, the 2016 SUNY Buffalo Student Entrepreneur Fellowship, and the 2017 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence. In 2017, he co-founded IEEE WCNEE, a new workshop that targets research on wireless communications and networking in extreme environments. In 2017, 2018 and 2019 he was program co-chair for WCNEE. In 2019, he was a best paper award finalist in the 15th IEEE International Workshop on Antenna Technology (iWAT). Currently, he serves as a special issue editor for the MDPI Sensors journal on underwater wireless communications and networking.