iMETA2023

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

List of Keynoters


Walid Saad Virginia Tech, USA	Mérouane Debbah Technology Innovation Institute (TII), UAE	Ian F. Akyildiz Truva Inc. and TII

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Professor Walid Saad

Virginia Tech, USA

Title: TBA

Biography:

Walid Saad received his Ph.D degree from the University of Oslo in 2010. He is currently a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he leads the Network sciEnce, Wireless, and Security (NEWS) laboratory. His research interests include wireless networks (5G/6G/beyond), machine learning, game theory, security, unmanned aerial vehicles, semantic communications) cyber-physical systems, and network science. Dr. Saad is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is also the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2013, the AFOSR summer faculty fellowship in 2014, and the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in 2015. He was the author/co-author of eleven conference best paper awards at WiOpt in 2009, ICIMP in 2010, IEEE WCNC in 2012, IEEE PIMRC in 2015, IEEE SmartGridComm in 2015, EuCNC in 2017, IEEE GLOBECOM in 2018, IFIP NTMS in 2019, IEEE ICC in 2020 and 2022, and IEEE GLOBECOM in 2020. He is the recipient of the 2015 and 2022 Fred W. Ellersick Prize from the IEEE Communications Society, of the 2017 IEEE ComSoc Best Young Professional in Academia award, of the 2018 IEEE ComSoc Radio Communications Committee Early Achievement Award, and of the 2019 IEEE ComSoc Communication Theory Technical Committee. He was also a co-author of the 2019 IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper and of the 2021 IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper. From 2015-2017, Dr. Saad was named the Stephen O. Lane Junior Faculty Fellow at Virginia Tech and, in 2017, he was named College of Engineering Faculty Fellow. He received the Dean award for Research Excellence from Virginia Tech in 2019. He was also an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer in 2019-2020. He currently serves as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking. He is an Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, an Associate Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC) – Special issue on Machine Learning for Communication Networks, and an Editor-at-Large for the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He is the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Machine Learning in Communications and Networking.

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Professor Mérouane Debbah

Chief Researcher, Technology Innovation Institute (TII)
Abu Dhabi, UAE

Title: TBA

Biography:

Mérouane Debbah is Chief Researcher at the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi. He is an Adjunct Professor with the Department of Machine Learning at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, France. He was with Motorola Labs, Saclay, France, from 1999 to 2002, and also with the Vienna Research Center for Telecommunications, Vienna, Austria, until 2003. From 2003 to 2007, he was an Assistant Professor with the Mobile Communications Department, Institut Eurecom, Sophia Antipolis, France. In 2007, he was appointed Full Professor at CentraleSupelec, Gif-sur-Yvette, France. From 2007 to 2014, he was the Director of the Alcatel-Lucent Chair on Flexible Radio. From 2014 to 2021, he was Vice-President of the Huawei France Research Center. He was jointly the director of the Mathematical and Algorithmic Sciences Lab as well as the director of the Lagrange Mathematical and Computing Research Center.

Since 2021, he is leading the AI & Telecom Systems center at the Technology Innovation Institute. He has managed 8 EU projects and more than 24 national and international projects. His research interests lie in fundamental mathematics, algorithms, statistics, information, and communication sciences research. He is an IEEE Fellow, a WWRF Fellow, a Eurasip Fellow, an AAIA Fellow, an Institut Louis Bachelier Fellow and a Membre émérite SEE. He was a recipient of the ERC Grant MORE (Advanced Mathematical Tools for Complex Network Engineering) from 2012 to 2017. He was a recipient of the Mario Boella Award in 2005, the IEEE Glavieux Prize Award in 2011, the Qualcomm Innovation Prize Award in 2012, the 2019 IEEE Radio Communications Committee Technical Recognition Award and the 2020 SEE Blondel Medal. He received more than 20 best paper awards, among which the 2007 IEEE GLOBECOM Best Paper Award, the Wi-Opt 2009 Best Paper Award, the 2010 Newcom++ Best Paper Award, the WUN CogCom Best Paper 2012 and 2013 Award, the 2014 WCNC Best Paper Award, the 2015 ICC Best Paper Award, the 2015 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize, the 2015 IEEE Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize, the 2016 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award, the 2016 European Wireless Best Paper Award, the 2017 Eurasip Best Paper Award, the 2018 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award, the 2019 IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper Award, the 2021 Eurasip Best Paper Award, the 2021 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award as well as the Valuetools 2007, Valuetools 2008, CrownCom 2009, Valuetools 2012, SAM 2014, and 2017 IEEE Sweden VT-COM-IT Joint Chapter best student paper awards. He is an Associate Editor-in-Chief of the journal Random Matrix: Theory and Applications. He was an Associate Area Editor and Senior Area Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING from 2011 to 2013 and from 2013 to 2014, respectively. From 2021 to 2022, he serves as an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Industry Speaker.

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Professor Ian F. Akyildiz

Founder and President of the Truva Inc
Advisory Board member at TII

Title: TBA

Biography:

I.F. Akyildiz (Life Fellow, IEEE) received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Erlangen–Nürnberg, Germany, in 1978, 1981, and 1984, respectively. He is also Founder and President of the Truva Inc., a consulting company based in Georgia, USA, since 1989. He is an Advisory Board member at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, since June 2020. He is the Founder and the Editor-in-Chief of the newly established of International Telecommunication Union Journal on Future and Evolving Technologies (ITU J-FET) since August 2020. He served as the Ken Byers Chair Professor in Telecommunications, the Past Chair of the Telecom Group at the ECE, and the Director of the Broadband Wireless Networking Laboratory, Georgia Institute of Technology, from 1985 to 2020. He had many international affiliations during his career and established research centers in Spain, South Africa, Finland, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Russia, India and Cyprus. Dr. Akyildiz is an IEEE Fellow since 1996, and ACM Fellow since 1997. He received numerous awards from IEEE, ACM, and other professional organizations, including Humboldt Award from Germany and Tubitak Award from Turkey. In June 2022, according to Google Scholar his h-index is 133 and the total number of citations to his articles is more than 134+K. His current research interests include Networking 2030, Hologram and Extended Reality Communication, 6G/7G wireless systems, Terahertz Communication, Underwater Communication.