Panel Discussion

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) approaches, well known from IT disciplines, are beginning to excite the networking and networked systems community. Of late, we are seeing a huge excitement about applying AI and ML to networked systems. Is this merely a hype? Are there use cases and genuine applications that could lead to real deployment and practical solutions? What are the key challenges in applying AI and ML to networked systems?

Can researchers and practitioners in communication networks and networked systems tap into machine learning and AI techniques to optimize network architecture, control and management, leading to increased automation in network operations? Can researchers and practitioners in the AI community explore synergy with networking researchers to optimize network architecture and design?

The above are some of the questions that would be addressed during the panel discussion. The objective of the panel discussion would be to tap the minds of the global experts in order to understand the merits and limitations and the future landscape in the intersection of networking/networked systems and AI/ML.

Panel Moderator

Pravin Bhagwat, Arista Networks, India/USA

Pravin Bhagwat is an entrepreneur and a wireless security researcher. He is Co-founder and CTO of Mojo Networks where he is responsible for setting technology direction and product strategy. In the past, Pravin has served as adjunct faculty at computer science department, IIT Kanpur and at WINLAB, Rutgers University, New Jersey. Prior to starting his entrepreneurial career, Pravin was a lead researcher at AT&T Research and IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York where he was a member of MobileIP, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth research projects. Pravin has research papers (with 1000+ citations) and 16 patents to his credit. He is also the recipient of 2005 Global Indus Technovator Award from the India Business Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pravin has a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur, India and an MS/PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park, USA.

Panelists

Andrea Goldsmith, Stanford University, USA

Dr. Andrea Goldsmith is the Stephen Harris professor in the School of Engineering and a professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. She co-founded and served as Chief Technical Officer of Plume WiFi and of Quantenna (QTNA), and she currently serves on the Corporate or Technical Advisory Boards of multiple public and private companies. She has also held industry positions at 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 ACM Athena Lecturer Award, the IEEE Comsoc Edwin H. Armstrong Achievement Award, the National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Lecture Award, the Women in Communications Engineering Mentoring 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 also launched and led several multi-university research projects. Her research interests are in information theory and communication theory, and their application to wireless communications and related fields. She received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley.

Manish Gupta, VideoKen & IIIT Bangalore, India

Dr. Manish Gupta is a co-founder and CEO of VideoKen, an educational technology startup, and the Infosys Foundation Chair Professor at IIIT Bangalore. Previously, Manish has served as Vice President and Director of Xerox Research Centre India, and has held various leadership positions with IBM, including that of Director, IBM Research - India and Chief Technologist, IBM India/South Asia. As a Senior Manager at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, Manish he led the team developing system software for the Blue Gene/L supercomputer. IBM was awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation for Blue Gene by US President Barack Obama in 2009. Manish holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He has co-authored about 75 papers, with more than 6,000 citations in Google Scholar (and an h-index of 42) in the areas of high-performance computing, compilers, and virtual machine optimizations, and has been granted 19 US patents. While at IBM, Manish received an Outstanding Innovation Award, two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and the Lou Gerstner Team Award for Client Excellence. Manish is currently serving as the chair of IKDD, the ACM India Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and was General Co-Chair for IKDD Conference on Data Sciences 2015. He is an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Delhi.

Rajeev Rastogi, Amazon, India

Rajeev Rastogi is an Indian computer scientist who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, where he got his Bachelor of Science degree in 1988. He received his Master's and Doctoral degrees from the University of Texas in 1990 and 1993 respectively. In 1993 Rastogi started working at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He became member of technical staff at its Information Sciences Research Center. Five years later he held the Distinguished Member of Technical Staff position and by 1999 became a director of the Internet Management Research Department and became a Bell Labs fellow in 2003. In 2012, he became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to the analysis and management of large data sets." He was Vice President of Yahoo! Labs in Bangalore and is currently serving as a director of Machine Learning on Amazon.com. He has over 200 peer-reviewed articles with the CURE: An Efficient Clustering Algorithm for Large Databases which received over 3,100 citations since 1998, bringing him an h-index of 63.

Gautam Shroff, TCS Research, India

As Vice President and Chief Scientist in TCS, Dr. Shroff heads TCS Research reporting to the CTO of TCS. TCS Research Prior to joining TCS in 1998, Dr. Shroff had been on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA (1990 - 91) and thereafter of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India (1991 - 1997). He has also held visiting positions at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, and at Argonne National Labs in Chicago. In 1994 he was conferred the ‘Young Scientist Award from the Indian Department of Atomic Energy. Dr. Shroff has published over 60 research papers in the areas of computational mathematics, parallel computation, distributed systems, software architecture, software engineering, big data, information fusion, virtual reality as well as artificial intelligence including machine learning, deep learning, Bayesian inference and natural language processing. He has written two books “Enterprise Cloud Computing” published by Cambridge University Press, UK, in October 2010, and “The Intelligent Web”, published by Oxford University Press, UK, in 2013 (paperback ed. 2015). In addition to corporate research and writing, in 2012 Dr. Shroff offered a massive open online course, or MOOC, titled “Web Intelligence and Big Data” in his capacity as an adjunct professor at IIT Delhi and IIIT Delhi. Dr. Shroff is an active member of ACM and ACM-India, is a member of the ACM India Council, was the founding chair of the ACM-India SIG on Knowledge Discovery from Data (IKDD), which is also the India chapter of ACM SIGKDD; and wass a member of the AI Task Force constituted in 2017 by the Ministry of Commerce & Industry in the Govt. of India.

Narendra Ahuja, UIUC, USA & ITRA, India

Narendra Ahuja is a Research Professor in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Beckman Institute, and Coordinated Science Laboratory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the Director of Information Technology Research Academy (ITRA) - a national initiative started by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, as a pilot for a new model of enhancing quality and impact of research and advanced education in India. He received the B.E. degree with honors in electronics engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, in 1972, the M.E. degree with distinction in electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India, in 1974, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park, USA, in 1979. In 1979, he joined the UIUC faculty where he was Donald Biggar Willet Professor until starting at ITRA in 2012. During 1999-2002, he served as the Founding Director of the first Indian Institute of Information Technology at Hyderabad, since renamed as International Institute of Information Technology. His current research is focused on extraction and representation of spatial structure in images and video; integrated use of multiple image-based sources for scene representation and recognition; computational cameras; and applications of computer vision to visual communication, image manipulation, and information retrieval, with focus on developing societies. He is a fellow of IEEE, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, International Association for Pattern Recognition, Association for Computing Machinery, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and International Society for Optical Engineering.

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