IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc)
Technical Committee on Communications Quality & Reliability (CQR)

Emerging Technology Reliability Roundtable 2020
(ETR-RT20)

Updates

Due to COVID-19, this event was postponed to June/July 2021
The exact date will be announced in January 2021

Scope of the Roundtable

  • Discuss and identify the RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability*) challenges, requirements and methodologies in the emerging technology areas like the Cloud Computing, Wireless/Mobility (with focus on 5G technologies), Artificial Intelligence (AI), NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), SDN
    (Software Defined Networking), or similar large-scale distributed and virtualization systems.
  • Discuss the RAS requirements and technologies for mission-critical industries (e.g., airborne systems, railway communication systems, the banking and financial communication systems, etc.), with the goal to promote the interindustry
    sharing of related ideas and experiences.
  • Identify potential directions for resolving identified issues and propose possible solution

*Serviceability: Focus on the technology, solutions and platforms which can improve Operation and Maintenance (O&M) ability, including Deployment, Monitoring, Upgrade/Patching, Adjustment, Troubleshooting, Fault Recovery, Data Configuration, etc. The target of Serviceability is to make the O&M work more Easily, Remotely, Automatically and Efficiently in order to achieve Low OPEX and High Customer Satisfaction.

Participants at the ETR-RT 2019 in Masala, Finland

David H. Lu, Network Systems, AT&T Technology Service – CIO, USA

David Lu currently leads a global team of more than 2,500 people responsible for the architecture, development, and engineering of AT&T’s next generation SDN (Software Defined Network) automation platform and open source (Linux Foundation ONAP) enabling AT&T’s network virtualization and target network systems transformation including PaaS & SaaS, policy control & orchestration, hyper-automation and AI/ML driven data analytics.

David is a well-respected leader in large scale, real time software architecture and development, network performance and traffic management, workflow and policy-controlled automation, large databases and big data implementation/mining/analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, software reliability and quality, and network operations process engineering. He has led major software platform transformation initiatives from sales to network, service delivery/assurance and billing platforms. Examples of his achievements include large scale platforms he has led and engineered that process annually: 6,580 Trillion network performance events and 422 Billion alarms with 99.99%+ automation; 75 Million fiber orders, and 500M Broadband Transactions with 4 Billion automated manual steps; and over 90 Billion API transactions with 26K servers (490K cores) and 165 PB storage.

Since joining AT&T Bell Labs in 1987, David has served in various leadership positions at AT&T. He has led numerous automation initiatives in AT&T that resulted in multibillion-dollar savings over the past 20 years and won AT&T’s CIO 100 Award in 2010. David holds 57 patents and frequently appears as a guest speaker at technical and leadership seminars and conferences throughout the world. He has received numerous industry awards including the 2015 Chairman’s Award from IEEE Communication Society for Network and Systems Quality and Reliability and 2017 CIE AAEOY (Asian America Engineer of Year) Award. David is very active in community organizations and activities including AT&T InspirAsian, AT&T OASIS, AT&T Women of Technology, DFW-CIE and DFW Asian American Chamber of Commerce. He was recognized by AT&T InspirAsian with the 2015 Corporate Leadership Award. David is an acclaimed cellist, passionate about technology and mentoring and a very proud husband and father.

Kathy Meier-Hellstern, Principal Engineer and Director, Google Research, USA

Meier-Hellstern is a Principal Engineer and Director in Google Research, serving as the Responsible AI Tech Lead for Google’s large language and multimodal models. Her research mission is to create scalable tools, data and processes for evaluating and improving Responsible AI in ML Models and Products. Kathy was previously a Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Google, focused on improving the end-to-end client experience in YouTube and Ads.

Before joining Google, Kathy was Assistant Vice President of Optimization, Reliability & Customer Analytics (ORCA) in AT&T Labs, responsible for delivering enhanced analytic tools and software for AT&T’s Next Generation networks. Kathy is an AT&T Fellow, and holds a Ph.D. and Master’s degree in Operations Research from University of Delaware.

Changliu Liu, Assistant Professor, Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA

Dr. Changliu Liu is an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where she leads the Intelligent Control Lab. Prior to joining CMU, Dr. Liu was a postdoc at Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley and her bachelor degrees from Tsinghua University. Her research interests lie in the design and verification of intelligent systems with applications to manufacturing and transportation. She published the book “Designing robot behavior in human-robot interactions” with CRC Press in 2019. Her work is recognized by NSF Career Award, Amazon Research Award, and Ford URP Award.

Technical Program Chair: Spilios Makris, Ph.D., Director, Palindrome Technologies, USA and Ex-Chairman of the IEEE SRPSDVE Study Group

Spilios Makris is currently the Director of Network Resilience and Business Continuity Management (BCM) in Palindrome Technologies. Spilios has extensive experience in BCM and network resilience serving as Director and Senior Consultant at Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore) for over 28 years, conducting studies and developing methodologies along with industry Best Practices for over 50 Tier 1&2 telecom companies, telecom vendors, and Telecom Regulatory Authorities (TRAs) worldwide. Spilios has served as Chair, Vice-Chair, Lead Contributor of the Standards T1A1.2 WG on “Network Survivability Performance” (was renamed PRQC Reliability Task Force) for 20 years. He successfully managed the development and regular update of Telcordia Generic Reliability Requirements documents establishing them as the “de facto” industry standards (e.g., SR-332 on Reliability Prediction Procedure for Electronic Equipment).
Spilios recently served as the Chair of the IEEE Study Group for Security, Reliability, and Performance for Software Defined and Virtualized Ecosystems (e.g., SDN, NFV, etc.). (http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/srpsdv/meeting_information.html).
Spilios received his PhD in Industrial Engineering & Operations Research from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Mass., MS in Engineering Management from Northeastern University, Boston, Mass., and Diploma (equiv. to MS) in Electrical & Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece.
He is a Certified Business Continuity Professional (CBCP) by the Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRII) and a Senior Member of IEEE.

General Chair: Chi-Ming Chen, Ph.D., AT&T Labs (retired Oct. 2018), USA

Chi-Ming Chen joined AT&T in 1995. He was with the AT&T Labs architecture organization which designs the Enhanced Control Orchestration Management Platform (ECOMP) and Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP). Prior to joining AT&T, Chi-Ming was with the Quality Assurance Center of Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) from 1985 to 1995 and was a faculty member at Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan from 1975 to 1979.

He received his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985; M.S. in Computer Science from the Pennsylvania State University in 1981; M.S. and B.S. in Physics from Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, in 1973 and 1971 respectively.

Chi-Ming Chen is a Life Senior Member of IEEE and Senior Member of the ACM. He is an Advisory Board Member of IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Technical Committee on Communications Quality & Reliability (CQR). He was a member of the IEEE GLOBECOM & ICC Management & Strategy (GIMS) Standing Committee and served as the GLOBECOM and ICC Site Selection Chair from 2012 to 2017. He has chaired the Industry Forums of several GLOBECOMs and ICCs and is serving as the GIMS Advisor for ICC 2019, Shanghai, China.

From 2015 to 2017, Chi-Ming was a Steering Committee member of the IEEE SDN Initiative and IEEE Big Data Initiative. Currently, he is co-chairing the 5G Roadmap Working Group of IEEE 5G Initiative. He has been a key Organizing Committee member of CyberC conference since it’s started in 2009. In addition, he also organizes the annual IEEE Emerging Technology Reliability Roundtable (ETR-RT) since 2014.

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