Speakers

Deniz Gunduz (Professor of Information Processing, Imperial College London)

Deniz Gündüz received the B.S. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from METU, Turkey in 2002, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from NYU Tandon School of Engineering (formerly Polytechnic University) in 2004 and 2007, respectively. Currently, he is a Professor of Information Processing in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department at Imperial College London, UK, where he also serves as the deputy head of the Intelligent Systems and Networks Group. In the past, he held various positions at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, University of Padova, CTTC, Princeton University and Stanford University.

His research interests lie in the areas of communications and information theory, machine learning, and privacy. Dr. Gündüz is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Signal Processing for Communications and Networking (SPCOM) and Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) Technical Committees. He serves as an area editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and IEEE Transactions on Communications. He is the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society - Communication Theory Technical Committee (CTTC) Early Achievement Award in 2017, Starting (2016) and Consolidator (2022) and Proof-of-Concept (2023) Grants of the European Research Council (ERC), and has co-authored several award-winning papers, including the IEEE Communications Society - Young Author Best Paper Award (2022), and the IEEE International Conference on Communications Best Paper Award (2023). He received the Imperial College London - President's Award for Excellence in Research Supervision in 2023.

Laurent Massoulié (Inria Paris, DIENS PSL University)

Laurent Massoulié is research scientist at Inria, scientific director of the Paris Inria Centre and professor at the Applied Maths Centre of Ecole Polytechnique. His research interests are in machine learning, probabilistic modelling and algorithms for networks. He has held research scientist positions at: France Telecom, Microsoft Research, Thomson-Technicolor, where he headed the Paris Research Lab. He obtained best paper awards at IEEE INFOCOM 1999, ACM SIGMETRICS 2005, ACM CoNEXT 2007, NeurIPS 2018, NeurIPS 2021, was elected "Technicolor Fellow" in 2011, received the  "Grand Prix Scientifique" of the Del Duca Foundation delivered by the French Academy of Science in 2017, is a Fellow of the “Prairie” Institute and received the ACM Sigmetrics achievement award in 2023.

Rawad Bitar (Institute for Communications Engineering, Technical University of Munich, Germany) 

Rawad Bitar is a research group leader at the Technical University of Munich doing a habilitation (accreditation for thesis supervision). He is the recipient of a German Research Foundation’s grant for a temporary position as Principal Investigator. He received the Diploma in computer and communication engineering from the Lebanese University, in 2013, the M.S. degree from the Doctoral School of the Lebanese University, in 2014, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in 2020. Before starting the habilitation in 2022, he spent two years as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Technical University of Munich. His research interests lie in the broad are of information theory and coding theory with a focus on coding for information theoretically private and secure distributed systems with application to machine learning and coding for DNA-based data storage.

Themistoklis Charalambous (Director of the Distributed and Networked Control Systems (DNCS) Group, University of Cyprus)

Themistoklis Charalambous received his BA (First Class Honours) and M.Eng (Distinction) in Electrical and Information Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge University. He completed his PhD studies in the Control Laboratory, of the Engineering Department, at Cambridge University in 2009. Following his PhD, he joined the Human Robotics Group as a Research Associate at Imperial College London for an academic year (September 2009-September 2010). Between September 2010 and December 2011, he worked as a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Cyprus. Between January 2012 and January 2015, he worked at the Division of Decision and Control of the Department of Intelligent Systems at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Between April 2015 and December 2016, he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Unit of Communication Systems at the Department of Electrical Engineering of Chalmers University of Technology. In January 2017, he joined Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, School of Electrical Engineering, Aalto University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. In September 2018, he was awarded the Academy of Finland Research Fellowship and in July 2020 he was appointed as a tenured Associate Professor. In September 2021, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Cyprus as a tenure-track Assistant Professor and he remains associated with Aalto University as a Visiting Professor. Since April 2023, he is also a Visiting Professor at the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities. 

René Bødker Christensen (Department of Mathematical Sciences, Aalborg University, Denmark)

René received his PhD in mathematics from Aalborg University in 2020. He is currently an assistant professor at Aalborg University, where he is associated with both the Department of Mathematical Sciences and the Department of Electronic Systems. His main research interests are in the area of quantum information, particularly when combined with techniques and applications from classical coding theory and private multiparty computation.

Malcolm Egan (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria))

Malcolm Egan received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2014 from the University of Sydney, Australia. He is currently a Chargé de Recherche (Tenured Research Scientist) in Inria and a member of CITI, a joint laboratory between Inria, INSA Lyon and Université de Lyon, France. Previously he was an assistant professor in INSA-Lyon, and a postdoctoral researcher with the Laboratoire de Mathématiques, Université Blaise Pascal, France and the Department of Computer Science, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic. He has also held visiting positions at Princeton University and the University of Bristol. From 2018-2022 (full term) he was an associate editor for IEEE Communications Letters. His research interests are in the areas of information theory, statistical signal processing and machine learning with applications in communications.

Hadrien Hendrikx (Inria Grenoble): distributed learning (PhD student)

Hadrien Hendrikx received a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2021 from Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, France. He is currently Chargé de Recherche (Tenured Research Scientist) at Inria and a member of LJK, a joint laboratory between Inria, CNRS, and Université Grenoble Alpes, France. Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher with the Machine Learning and Optimization lab at EPFL (2021-2023). His research focuses on (but is not limited to) stochastic optimization with application to machine learning, in particular in distributed (decentralized) and/or non-euclidean settings. 

David Karpuk (Senior Data Scientist, WithSecure Corporation, Finland)

David Karpuk received the B.A. degree in mathematics from Boston College in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from The University of Maryland, College Park, in 2012. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland, from 2012 to 2017, and an Assistant Professor with the Department of Mathematics, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, from 2017 to 2019. He is currently a Senior Data Scientist at WithSecure Corporation, Helsinki, and a Senior Visiting Researcher at Aalto University, where his research interests include privacy and security in distributed computation, and applications of machine learning to cyber security. He was a recipient of Postdoctoral Researcher grants from the Academy of Finland and the Magnus Ehrnrooth Foundation.

Derya Malak (Communication Systems Department, Eurecom, France)

Derya Malak is an Assistant Professor (Maître de Conférence) in Communication Systems at Eurecom, France. She received her Ph.D. in ECE at the University of Texas at Austin in 2017, B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE) with a minor in Physics at Middle East Technical University, in 2010, and M.S. in EEE at Koc University, in 2013. Her expertise is in information theory, communication theory, and networking areas. She has developed novel distributed computation solutions, and wireless caching algorithms by capturing the confluence of storage, communication, and computation aspects. 

Dr. Malak was awarded the Graduate School fellowship by UT Austin between 2013-2017. She was selected to participate in the Rising Stars Workshop for women in EECS, MIT, in 2018. She received the best paper awards in WiOpt 2022 and WiOpt 2023. Her research has been funded by the Huawei Chair program on Advanced Wireless Systems (lead 2022-), ANR PEPR, NSF, the Rensselaer-IBM AI Research Collaboration, and the DARPA Dispersive Computing Programs. She is the recipient of the ERC Starting Grant 2023-2028 on computing nonlinear functions over communication networks (SENSIBILITE).

Giovanni Neglia (Research Director, Inria, France)

Giovanni Neglia is a researcher at Inria, France, since 2008, and holds a chair on Pervasive Sustainable Learning Systems at the 3IA Côte d'Azur (one of the French Interdisciplinary Institutes on Artificial Intelligence), since 2021. He received his Habilitation in 2017 from the Université Côte d'Azur, France, his PhD and electronic engineering degree from University of Palermo, Italy, respectively in 2005 and in 2001. Before joining Inria as a permanent researcher, he was a research scholar at the University Massachusetts Amherst, (2005) and a postdoc at Inria (2006-2007). His research activity focuses on modelling and performance evaluation of networked systems and proposals of new mechanisms to improve their performance. Currently, his main interests are federated learning and online learning. 

Arun Padakandla (Communication Systems Department,  EURECOM, France) 

Arun Padakandla received the M.Sc. degree in Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Following this, he received the M.Sc. degree in Mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering, both from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. From 2014 to 2015, we worked for Ericsson Research at San Jose, USA in the role of a Research Engineer. During this time, he contributed to receiver design of short range radio used in IoT applications. In 2015, he was awarded a Center-Wide postdoctoral research fellowship with the National Science Foundation Center for Science of Information (CSoI). During his time at CSoI, he focused his research on emerging topics such as data privacy and obtained new results on some long-standing fundamental problems in network information theory. From 2018 to 2023, he served as an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at the Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville and began conducting research in quantum information science. Since 2023, he is with EURECOM, Sophia, France in the role of a Maître de conférences. His research interests lie in quantum and classical information science with specific emphasis in quantum information theory. 

Eirik Rosnes (Simula UiB, Norway)

Eirik Rosnes received the Cand. Scient. degree in physics and the Dr. Scient. degree in informatics from the University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway, in 1999 and 2003, respectively. From 2003 to 2011, he was with the Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, first as a Postdoctoral Researcher and then as a Senior Researcher. From September 2001 to March 2002 and from March 2005 to September 2005, he was a Visiting Scholar with the Center for Magnetic Recording Research, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA. From October 2011 to August 2013, he was a Senior Engineer with Ceragon Networks, and since August 2013, he has been with both Simula Research Laboratory / Simula UiB as a Senior Researcher (from 2020 as a Chief Research Scientist) and Head of Department and the University of Bergen (until August 2017) as an Adjunct Associate Professor. His research interests are in the areas of communication theory and information theory and include classical error-control coding, quantum error-correction, coding for privacy and security, and distributed computing and learning. Dr. Rosnes was a Technical Program Co-Chair for the 2009 International Workshop on Coding and Cryptography, Ullensvang, Norway, and served as Area Editor for the AEU International Journal of Electronics and Communications from October 2014 to January 2020. He is currently serving as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications.