For 2020, in alphabetical order by last name, here are 10 amazing stars in networking and communications that you should know!
 | Angeliki Alexiou Professor at the University of Piraeus, Department of Digital Systems, Greece. Main research interests: radio interface for beyond 5G systems, MIMO and high frequencies (mmWave and THz wireless) technologies. Angeliki Alexiou is a professor at the department of Digital Systems, ICT School, University of Piraeus. She received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1994 and the PhD in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of London in 2000. Since May 2009 she has been a faculty member at the Department of Digital Systems, where she conducts research and teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the area of Broadband Communications and Advanced Wireless Technologies. Prior to this appointment she was with Bell Laboratories, Wireless Research, Lucent Technologies, (later Alcatel-Lucent, now NOKIA), from January 1999-April 2009, in Swindon, UK, first as a member of technical staff and later as a Technical Manager. Professor Alexiou is a co-recipient of Bell Labs President’s Gold Award in 2002 for contributions to Bell Labs Layered Space-Time (BLAST) project and the Central Bell Labs Teamwork Award in 2004 for role model teamwork and technical achievements in the IST FITNESS project. Professor Alexiou is the Chair of the Working Group on Radio Communication Technologies and of the Working Group on High Frequencies Radio Technologies of the Wireless World Research Forum. She is a member of the IEEE and the Technical Chamber of Greece. Her current research interests include radio interface advances for beyond 5G systems, MIMO and THz wireless technologies, cooperation and coordination in Ultra Dense wireless networks, ‘cell-less’ architectures based on extreme resources sharing and machine learning for wireless systems. She is the project coordinator of the H2020 TERRANOVA project (ict-terranova.eu) and the technical manager of H2020 ARIADNE project (ict-ariadne.eu). “Angela’s research results on advanced radio technology innovations, in the areas of MIMO, Wireless Networks Extreme Densification, and THz Communications, have catalyzed wireless evolution, with remarkable impact and are highly cited. Angela is an influential leader, bringing pioneering ideas to the research she is conducting. She is a role model for female students. She has excellent skills of leadership and negotiation. Being colleagues in the department and working together is always a pleasure.” - Andriana Prentza, Professor, Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece |
 | Katerina Argyraki Associate Professor at EPFL, Switzerland Main research interests: Network systems. Katerina is an associate professor of Computer Science at EPFL. Her research area is network architecture and systems, and she is particularly interested in issues of network transparency and neutrality. She has co-chaired SIGCOMM and NSDI. She has shared two best-paper awards – SOSP (2009) and NSDI (2014) – and an IRTF applied networking research award (2020). And she has been honored with the EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award (2016), two teaching awards from her department, and a teaching award from the EPFL student association. She got her PhD from Stanford in 2007. “Significant contributions towards answering fundamental questions regarding network system design, such as a) can we infer network behavior from external observations? b) can we improve Internet transparency? c) is Internet transparency compatible with user privacy? d) how should we write packet-processing software, such that we can reason about its semantics or about its performance?“ - Panagiota Fatourou, Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Crete, Greece |
 | Lin Cai Professor at University of Victoria Main research interests: network architectures and protocols; wireless. Lin Cai’s research interests span several areas in communications and networking, with a focus on network protocol and architecture design supporting Internet of Things and emerging multimedia applications. She is a Professor with the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Victoria. She is an NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. In 2020, she was elected as a Member of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. She has co-founded and chaired the IEEE Victoria Section Vehicular Technology and Communications (VTS/ComSoc) Joint Societies Chapter. She has been elected to serve the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society Board of Governors, 2019 - 2021. “With her demonstrated excellence in research, Prof. Cai has earned a stellar international reputation as a leader in the fields of wireless networking and communications, a highly competitive and versatile domain with broad impacts. Her technical contributions to wireless networking have assisted the industry and government partners for networking product and IEEE802/LTE/5G standard development and policy-making advice.” - Xuemin Shen, Professor, ECE Dept. University of Waterloo, Canada |
 | Priya Mahadevan Google, Network architect Main research interests: network architectures, performance and networked systems. Priya Mahadevan is a Network Architect at Google where her work focuses on networked systems, network architecture, network performance and anomaly detection. Prior to joining Google, Priya was a Research Scientist at PARC and HP Labs. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego. Her expertise, publications and patents are in the areas of network architecture, Internet topologies, network measurements and analysis, networked systems, performance and efficiency. She has served on several technical program committees including ACM IMC, PAM, and IEEE ICNP. “Priya has established a track record of highly influential research results over the years, including her work on Internet topology and her work on energy-efficient networking. Her work on Internet topology measurement and random graph generation matching the inherent underlying characteristics of the Internet remain the reference efforts in this space almost 15 years later. The effort showed that joint degree distributions -- the probability of having an edge between two nodes of given degrees is capable of reproducing a wide variety of metrics from the literature, with associated papers in CCR and SIGCOMM (twice) now collectively cited more than 1000 times. Her work on energy efficient networking also remains a reference effort. For example, Priya's NSDI 2010 paper on ElasticTree shows how to create datacenter network topologies that can power on and off portions of the topology depending on traffic levels, potentially saving a tremendous fraction of the network's total power consumption. ElasticTree has now been cited more than 1100 times. Her associated paper on power measurement infrastructure for networking systems has been cited more than 400 times. In summary, Priya is one of the top researchers in networking and today brings her expertise to the construction and architecture of Google's network. She combines tremendous insight with substantial community contributions. Please consider Priya strongly for recognition as a Star in Computer Networking and Communications.” - Amin Vahdat, Google Fellow and Technical Lead for networking at Google |
 | Nathalie Mitton Scientific head of the FUN research group at Inria Lille-Nord Europe Main research interests: IoT, wireless sensor networks, communications. Nathalie Mitton received the MSc and PhD. degrees in Computer Science from INSA Lyon in 2003 and 2006 respectively. She received her Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) in 2011 from Université Lille 1. She is currently an Inria full researcher since 2006 and from 2012, she is the scientific head of the Inria FUN team. Her research interests focus on self-organization from PHY to routing for wireless constrained networks. She has published her research in more than 50 international revues and more than 120 international conferences. She is involved in the set up of the FIT IoT LAB platform (http://fit-equipex.fr/, https://www.iot-lab.info), the H2020 CyberSANE and VESSEDIA projects and in several program and organization committees such as Infocom (since 2019), PerCom 2020&2019, DCOSS (since 2019), Adhocnow (since 2015), ICC (since 2015), Globecom (since 2017), Pe-Wasun 2017, VTC (since 2016), etc. She also supervises several PhD students and engineers. “The quality and importance of Nathalie Mitton's results in less than 15 years are very impressive. Nathalie Mitton is an extremely dynamic colleague, very friendly, and having an open mind to work outside her field of expertise” - Colette Johnen, Professor, Laboratoire LABRI, Université de Bordeaux, France |
 | Öznur Özkasap Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey Main research interests: distributed systems, peer-to-peer algorithms, energy efficiency. Öznur Özkasap is a Professor of Computer Engineering at Koç University where she is leading the Distributed Systems and Reliable Networks (DISNET) Research Laboratory. Her research interests include distributed systems, peer-to-peer algorithms, energy efficiency, reliable network protocols, cloud and edge computing, mobile and vehicular networks, security in distributed systems, and artificial intelligence in distributed systems. Prof. Özkasap’s papers have appeared in high impact journals in her field. She has published more than hundred research papers and received best paper awards. She is an Area Editor for the Future Generation Computer Systems journal, Elsevier Science, and Cluster Computing journal, Springer. She was a recipient of the Career Award of TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey), Turk Telekom Collaborative Research Awards, and The Informatics Association of Turkey 2019 Prof. Aydin Koksal Computer Engineering Science Award. She was awarded Teaching Innovation Grants by Koç University. She is a senior member of the IEEE and the vice chair of ACM-Women Ankara Professional Chapter. She has served as the general co-chair, technical program chair and technical committee member for several international conferences. “Oznur has made significant contributions to the distributed systems and computer networks fields, provided new scientific insights, outstanding research outcomes and service contributions. Her papers have appeared in several high impact journals, well-cited and she has received several awards. Her track record of cutting-edge work and service has established her as a star in her field. “ - Ying-Dar Lin, Professor, CS Dept., National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Taiwan |
 | Niki Trigoni Professor at the Oxford University Department of Computer Science and a fellow of Kellogg College, CTO of Navenio Ltd. Main research interests: intelligent and autonomous systems. Niki Trigoni is Professor at the Oxford Department of Computer Science, heading the Cyber Physical Systems Group. Her interests lie in the tight integration of sensing and machine intelligence for context inference, control and human-machine interaction. She has applied her work to a number of application scenarios, including mobile autonomy, asset monitoring, and localisation systems for workforce safety and efficiency. Trigoni has founded and served from 2014-2019 as Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training on Autonomous and Intelligent Machines and Systems. Driven by her passion for research translation, in 2015, she founded Navenio Ltd, a deep tech Oxford spinout on infrastructure free indoor positioning, and a 2020 KPMB Best British Tech Pioneer. In 2020, she won the CTO of the Year award at the UK's Women in IT Awards, demonstrating impact from translating positioning tech to improve efficiency in the healthcare sector. “15 years’ experience in cyber physical systems, won several awards for her group's work on indoor and underground positioning. Founded Navenio Ltd., an infrastructure-free, highly scalable, accurate and robust indoor location solutions.” - Varisara Burapachaisi, Doctoral Candidate, University of Oxford, United Kingdom |
 | Nalini Venkatasubramanian Professor at UC Irvine Main research interests: distributed systems. Nalini Venkatasubramanian is currently a Professor in the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California Irvine. She has had significant research and industry experience in the areas of distributed systems, adaptive middleware, pervasive and mobile computing, Internet-of-Things and cyberphysical systems, distributed multimedia, and formal methods and has over 250 publications in these areas. As a key member of the Center for Emergency Response Technologies at UC Irvine, Nalini's recent research has focused on enabling resilient, sustainable, and scalable observation and analysis of situational information from multimodal input sources; dynamic adaptation of the underlying systems to enable information flow under massive failures and the dissemination of rich notifications to members of the public at large. Her research has resulted in system artifacts that have been deployed and used by communities and agencies globally. She is the recipient of the prestigious NSF Career Award, multiple Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Awards, Technology Transition Awards, and several Best Paper awards. Prof. Venkatasubramanian has chaired and served in numerous program and organizing committees of conferences on middleware, distributed systems, IoT, and multimedia and on the editorial boards of journals. She received her M.S and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Her research has been supported both by government and industrial sources such as NSF, DARPA, DHS, ONR, NASA, State of CA, Novell, Hewlett-Packard and Nokia. Prior to arriving at UC Irvine, Nalini was a Research Staff Member at the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. “Outstanding research, projects and best papers in the distributed systems, networking and communications field.” - Nailah Alhassoun, PhD candidate, University of California, Irvine, USA |
 | Jing Yang Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University Main research interests: statistical learning, optimization of networked systems, and information theory. Jing Yang’s research interests span from wireless communications and networking, information theory, to statistical signal processing and machine learning. Her research seeks to open new frontiers in understanding the fundamental limits of wireless networking systems, as well as designing efficient scheduling, resource allocation and learning algorithms for system performance optimization. She has been among the first researchers working on energy harvesting communications, Age of Information, and machine learning for wireless networking systems. She received the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2015 and the WICE Early Achievement Award in 2020. She has served as a Symposium/Workshop Co-chair for ICC 2021, INFOCOM 2021-AoI Workshop, WCSP 2019, CTW 2015, PIMRC 2014, a TPC Member of several conferences, and an Editor for IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications and IEEE Trans. on Green Communications and Networking. “Dr. Yang has made pioneering contributions to the field of energy harvesting communications, and significant contributions to the field of age of information. Dr. Yang wrote one of the earliest papers in the field of energy harvesting communications, determining optimal packet scheduling schemes for such networks. Dr. Yang has been making significant contributions to the field of age of information, determining optimal status update schemes for keeping information fresh in networks.” - Sennur Ulukus, Professor, ECE Dept., University of Maryland, USA |
 | Peiying Zhu Fellow/Senior Director of the Wireless Technology Lab, Huawei, Canada Main research interests: wireless networking, 5G/6G. Dr. Peiying Zhu, Senior Vice President of Wireless Research, is a Huawei Fellow, IEEE Fellow and Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering. She is currently leading 5G and beyond wireless research and standardization in Huawei. The focus of her research is advanced radio access technologies. She is actively involved in 3GPP and IEEE 802 standards development. She has been regularly giving talks and panel discussions on 5G vision and enabling technologies. She led the team to contribute significantly to 5G technologies. Prior to joining Huawei in 2009, Peiying was a Nortel Fellow and Director of Advanced Wireless Access Technology in the Nortel Wireless Technology Lab. She led the team and pioneered research and prototyping on MIMO-OFDM and Multi-hop relay. Many of these technologies developed by the team have been adopted into LTE standards and 4G products. Dr. Zhu has more than 200 granted patents “Dr. Peiying Zhu is the Senior Director of the Wireless Technology Lab at Huawei Canada; she leads the company's 5G/6G wireless research in the global level. Arguably, Dr. Zhu is the world's leading woman researcher in the telecom industry with 300+ granted US patents to her credit (the total number of her patents granted and applied including all the jurisdictions may be close to 1,000). Dr. Zhu has made substantial contributions to 3G, 4G, and 5G networks. The scope of these inventions covered every aspect of the 4G wireless air-interface fundamental designs and considered as crown jewels for LTE. These innovations are used for more than 2 million base-stations and 4 billion mobile phones and smart-phones around the globe. As it can be seen in her Google Scholar profile (which may be incomplete), the number of citations to her patents is more than 20,000 -- quite unprecedented. Once again, I am not aware of any woman in industry who has made more contributions to wireless communications research than Dr. Zhu. Dr. Zhu is an IEEE Fellow, Huawei Fellow (then only 12 fellows between more than 60,000 employees), Nortel Fellow (a lifetime honor bestowed to selected 8 individuals in Nortel’s R&D community in Nortel’s 114 years history), and Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE) Fellow. She has a long list of international awards, recognitions, and media coverage. As a woman technologist, leader, and inventor with such high distinctive recognitions by the peers from both world-leading companies and academia, she is a remarkable individual with a rare talent and personal character of leadership.” - Halim Yanikomeroglu, Professor, FIEEE, FEIC, FCAE, Carleton University, Canada |
