Subject: [PANRG] NAI@SIGCOMM'21 (Monday, Aug. 23)

From: "Y. Richard Yang" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2021 21:56:06 -0400

Apologies if you receive duplicates.

We want to kindly invite you to attend NAI'21 tomorrow (Monday, Aug. 23) at
SIGCOMM'21, because we feel that the program is highly relevant and your
participation and engagement can be very valuable.

Some *highlights*:
- Keynote (10:10-10:50 AM EDT):
  *Title: “Dynamic Network Adaptation (DNA)”*
  Keynote Speaker: *Jonathan Smith (Olga and Alberico Pompa Professor,
UPenn/DARPA Program Manager)*

- Keynote (12:30-13:15)
  Title: *Application-Defined Networking*
  Keynote Speaker: *Amin Vahdat* (Engineering Fellow and Vice President of
Systems Infrastructure)

- Panel (15:50-16:55)
  Richard Alimi (Google)
  Yixue Lei (Tencent)
  Håkon Lonsethagen (Telenor)
  Qin Wu (Huawei)
  Zhi-Li Zhang (Univ. of Minnesota)

Panel questions:
Q1. Can you describe one key NAI, broadly defined (i.e., network-aware
applications, application-aware networking, or both), project that you are
involved in or consider to be important (which can be by others)?
Q2. In your opinion, what are the most important one or two trends and
opportunities, in either industry development or academic research, in
application-aware networking (AAN)? For each trend or opportunity, what are
the key challenges to be addressed for it to be successful?
Q3. In your opinion, what are the most important trends and opportunities,
in either industry development or academic research, in network-aware
applications (NAA)? For each trend or opportunity, what are the key
challenges to be addressed for it to be successful?
Q4. Do you see the integration of AAN and NAA, or they should/will develop
independently?

Participation details:
- *Time: Monday, August 23, 2021, 15:50 pm-17:00 EDT*
- *Zoom link*:
https://zoom.us/j/95681536728?pwd=N2NwNjdWRWJCZ2RrMzI3N1hvYlRYdz09
- Complete program
  https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2021/workshop-nai.html

We look forward to seeing many of you.

Richard

==== Bios of keynote speakers, panelists ====
*Bio of Jonathan Smith*: Jonathan Smith joined DARPA as a Program Manager
in September 2017 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a
professor of computer and information science and the Olga and Alberico
Pompa Professor of Engineering and Applied Science. He will return to U.
Penn in September 2021.

His long-term objective is the creation of useful distributed computing
systems. In research, he developed new protocol design paradigms in the
``Protocol Boosters'' project, and led the SwitchWare active networking
effort, centered on the design of secure, high-performance programmable
network infrastructures, based on a ``Store-Translate-and-Forward''
packet-switching model. As a DARPA program manager, he seeks to develop and
execute programs in cybersecurity, networking, and distributed computing.
He has led the development and execution of multiple programs including
Situation Aware Protocols In Edge Network Technologies (SAPIENT), Adaptive
Cognition Enhanced Radio Teams (ACERT), Brood of Spectrum Supremacy (BOSS),
Dispersed Computing, Edge-Directed Cyber Technologies for Reliable Mission
Communication (EdgeCT), Fast Network Interface Cards (FastNICs), Open,
Programmable, Secure 5G (OPS-5G), and Extreme DDoS Defense (XD3). His work
at DARPA was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for
Exceptional Public Service in August 2006.

He joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 from Bell Communications
Research, where he was a member of the technical staff, a position he also
held at Bell Telephone Laboratories.

*Amin Vahdat Bio*: Amin Vahdat is an Engineering Fellow and Vice President
for Systems Infrastructure at Google, where his team is responsible for
Compute (Google Compute Engine, Borg/Cluster Scheduling, Operating Systems
and Kernel), Platforms (TPUs, Accelerators, Servers, Storage, and
Networking), and Network Infrastructure (Datacenter, Campus, RPC, and End
Host network software). Until 2019, he was the Area Technical Lead for
networking at Google, responsible for Google's Technical Infrastructure
roadmap in collaboration with peers in Compute, Storage, and Hardware.
Vahdat is active in Computer Science research, with more than 41,000
citations to over 200 refereed publications across cloud infrastructure,
software defined networking, data consistency, operating systems, storage
systems, data center architecture, and optical networking.

In the past, he was the SAIC Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
at UC San Diego and the Director of UCSD’s Center for Networked Systems.
Vahdat received his PhD from UC Berkeley in Computer Science, is an ACM
Fellow and a past recipient of the NSF CAREER award, UC Berkeley
Distinguished EECS Alumni Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the
Duke University David and Janet Vaughn Teaching Award. Most recently, Amin
was awarded the SIGCOMM lifetime achievement award for his groundbreaking
contributions to data center and wide area networks.

Richard Alimi (Google) Bio: Rich joined Google after completing his Ph. D
at Yale University in Computer Science in 2010. He spent 8 years in
Bandwidth SRE, working on productionizing and expanding our admission
control and traffic engineering systems. Along the way, Rich helped form an
SRE team to help grow Google’s software defined networking capabilities,
then expanded into network reliability strategy. Rich is an Uber Tech Lead
within Core Networking SRE, the SRE organization responsible for Google’s
production network.

Yixue Lei (Tencent) bio: Yixue has been working in wireless technologies
area after completing his Ph. D at Beijing University of Posts and
Telecommunications (BUPT) in 2007.  After joined Tencent, his research
focuses on application and network interaction & integration over
heterogeneous wired & wireless networks.  Yixue has been contributing to
4G/5G standardization in 3GPP continuously for 14 years and as the
rapporteur of 3GPP Rel-17 work item 5G_AIS, he leads and complete this work
item in June 2021 which targets 5G system enhancements for advanced
interactive services(AIS) including cloud gaming, XR and tele-operated
driving etc.  Yixue is responsible for standard research team within
Tencent Future Network Lab which is working on 5G-related product
development, service rollout and also global standards in IETF, 3GPP, ITU
etc.

Håkon Lonsethagen (Telenor) bio: Mr. Håkon Lønsethagen is a Senior Research
Scientist at Telenor Research. Since 1990 he has been working with telecom
network and service management, orchestration, and control, including
systems integration and distributed systems frameworks, architectures, and
middleware. Over the last years his activities have addressed
inter-provider network services and business models, Internet evolution,
lately including SDN, NFV and 5G technologies and ecosystems. This includes
curiosity to discover and analyse dependencies between technical
architecture, business architecture and multi-provider ecosystem platforms.
He is currently engaged with the European 5G PPP, and member of 5G
Infrastructure Association and NetworldEurope Steering Boards.

Qin Wu (Huawei) bio: Qin Wu joined Huawei after completing his Ph.D at
Nanjing Science&Technology University in Control Theory and Engineering in
2006. He is a Lead Member of Technical Staff in Huawei's Data Communication
Network Management Architecture and Design Business Group and currently a
network management architect for Huawei's Carrier and Enterprise Network
and manage Huawei's industry standards strategy across the company for
Network Management Automation and Data Modeling technologies. He is active
in IETF and was cochair of L3SM Working Group,L2SM Working Group in OPS
area, currently chair ALTO Working Group, has over 15 years of experience
on network design, working on network automation and YANG, performance
measurement,  coauthor of over 49 RFCs spanning six IETF Areas (OPS, SEC,
RTG, TSV, RAI, and INT).

Zhi-Li Zhang (Univ. of Minnesota) bio: Zhi-Li Zhang received Ph.D. degree
in computer science from the University of Massachusetts.  He joined the
faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the
University of Minnesota in 1997, where he is currently the McKnight
Distinguished University Professor and  Qwest Chair Professor in
Telecommunications. He currently also serves as the Associate Director for
Research at the Digital Technology Center, University of Minnesota. Prof.
Zhang's research interests lie broadly in computer and communication
networks, Internet technology, multimedia systems and content distribution
networks, cyber-physical systems and Internet-of-Things, and (applied)
machine learning and data mining. Prof. Zhang has published more than 100
journal and conference/workshop papers, many of them in top venues in
networking and related fields. He is co-recipient of several Best Papers
awards including IEEE INFOCOM, ICNP and ACM SIGMETRI.CS Prof. Zhang has
chaired the program committees of several major conferences in networking
including IEEE INFOCOM, ACM SIGMETRICS, IEEE ICNP and ACM Internet
Measurement Conference (IMC), and served on the Editorial Board of several
journals such as IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, ACM TOMPECS, and PACM
MACS. He is a Fellow of IEEE.