Roy Chua is Founder and Principal at AvidThink, an independent research and advisory service formed in 2018 out of SDxCentral's research group. Prior to co-founding SDxCentral and running its research and product teams, Roy was a management consultant working with both Fortune 500 and startup technology companies on go-to-market and product consulting.  As an early proponent of the software-defined infrastructure movement, Roy is a frequent speaker at technology events in the telco and cloud space and a regular contributor to leading online publications. A graduate of UC Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science program and MIT's Sloan School of Business, Roy has 20+ years of experience in telco and enterprise cloud computing, networking and security, including founding several Silicon Valley startups.

Since October 2011 Diego R. Lopez is in charge of Technology Exploration at the Global CTO Unit, within Telefónica I+D. His responsibilities are related to the definition and coordination of research projects in the areas of new networking technologies and network infrastructures. He is directly involved in activities related to network virtualization, core optimization, AAA, traffic analysis, and infrastructure security.   He is actively participating in the ETSI ISG on Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), chairing its Technical Steering Committee. He is acting as representative of Telefónica in bodies related to network technologies, like the ONF and the BBF, and contributing to several working groups inside IETF.Diego have been appointed by the European Commission as member of the High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data e-Infrastructures (HLEG-SDI).   He received his MS from the University of Granada in 1985, and his PhD degree from the University of Seville in 2001. Since 1985 he have worked for several private and public organisations, developing and deploying communication services.   From 2000 to 2011 he was responsible for the Middleware Area of RedIRIS, the Spanish National Research and Educational Network. As part of these tasks he actively participate in national and international working groups and projects, and he have collaborated in several versions of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group White Paper, under the auspices of the EU Presidency, in areas related to security and digital identity services.   His current areas of interest are network middleware and network intelligence, virtualization of network architectures, control and signaling protocols, infrastructural and mediation service, and new network architectures and services  Specialities: NFV and Software Networks. Internet middleware. Federated architectures. Directories (LDAP). Identity management systems: SAML, OpenID, OAuth. PKI. Internet security. RESTful services. RDF. SDN: OpenFlow

François Jezequel works currently for Orange Group and more specifically within the Technology and Global Innovation Division, in a direction called Orange Labs Networks.   He leads two main streams: the development of mutual relationships with telecommunications operators on key transformation topics - such as 5G, SDN/NFV and recently AI; to build bilateral partnerships; the coordination of the technology cooperation on networks - with Deutsche Telekom since 2011 and BuyIN for the procurement aspects (Orange-DT Joint Venture for procurement)   He is really excited by the challenges offered by Artificial Intelligence and has been elected representative of the General Members at the Linux Foundation Deep Learning (LF DL) Board (since April 2018). He considers the LF DL as an opportunity to drive AI development in open source community with peers, suppliers and partners.   Previously in his career, he has successfully driven during 10 years IT projects for Orange Group before moving to a corporate architecture position within Equant. He has more particularly coordinated Orange Group (France Telecom) IT convergence program in 2005.   François holds a MS in Software engineering from Telecom Paris Sud,

As director in the MEF's Office of the CTO, Daniel is responsible for the development and implementation of a range of strategic MEF programs that are central to MEF's transformation to an agile-process oriented standards development organization. These innovative programs - including the MEF Software Developer Community, MEFnet global implementation platform, and MEF Reference Implementations - enable MEF's 210+ member companies to implement draft and published service orchestration and definitions work in code, and to make available standardized open APIs that accelerate the availability of highly agile, assured and orchestrated services for today's hyper-connected world.   Daniel has been involved in the networking industry for 25 years holding a variety of positions in RAD Data Communications, as well as co-founding Resolute Networks where he held executive positions. Representing Resolute in the MEF, Daniel served for 3 years as MEF Global Marketing Co-Chair and was elected three times to the MEF Board of Directors. Since 2010, Daniel has been a senior member of the MEF staff.

Valéry Augais is a senior network architect in Colt’s Network On-Demand Architecture & Design team. He joined Colt’s engineering department in 1998 as an access and metro technologies specialist.  In the 2010’s he has been actively involved in: the design and roll-out of next-generation packet-based Carrier Ethernet networks and services; the modular integration of the optical, Ethernet and IP layers with the aim of simplifying the transport and service architectures; the evolution of the access network for a smarter mobile backhaul offering; the assessment and development of FTTx technologies and architectures for Colt. Since more recently his current research focus is on optical SDN services, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, and NFV infrastructure.   Valéry holds two M.Sc. degrees in Telecommunications and Computing from Telecom ParisTech and UPMC University, France.

Principal Engineer at Juniper Networks, and the prime architect of HealthBot, a network analytics product providing diagnostics, root cause analysis, anomaly detection, prediction, remediation, and customizable device and network health views.

As CTO at Amdocs, Dr. Eyal Felstaine is responsible for planning and developing Amdocs’ technology vision and roadmap of the entire product portfolio. One of his focus points is the development and application of Acumos AI in the telco industry – Acumos is a platform and open source framework that makes it easy to build, share and deploy AI apps and its aim is to standardise the infrastructure stack and components required to run an out-of-the-box general AI environment. Acumos is part of the Linux Foundation Deep Learning Foundation of which Eyal is a member of the Deep Learning Governing Board Linux Foundation. Eyal also established Amdocs’ NFV group, developed and executed Amdocs’ award-winning NFV strategy (Light Reading), led the ECOMP co-creation program with AT&T around their software-centric Domain 2.0 vision of achieving 75% virtualization in their network by 2020, and took an active role in the creation of Linux Foundation’s ONAP working group – he continues to help drive ONAP’s path forward as a member of the governing board of Linux Foundation’s Network Group.   An innovator and entrepreneur by nature, Eyal has also co-founded and held CXO positions in several successful startups in the communications and evolved-packet core space. These include Traffix Systems, acquired by F5 Networks, Allot Communications [NASDAQ:ALLT] and SANRAD, acquired by OCZ Technology [NASDAQ: OCZ] (OCZ was later acquired by Toshiba Japan). He has also served as VP and head of Radware’s Cyber Security division [NASDAQ: RDWR]. An experienced speaker at industry conferences, Eyal has authored numerous refereed papers, holds over two dozen patents to his name, and has won several prestigious awards for research excellence in network security. Eyal holds a Ph.D., M.A.in Computer Science and B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering – from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and an MBA from Columbia University, NY.

Mr. Drooghaag has significant experience applying data science concepts to access networks for troubleshooting and quality of end user experience predictions.   He was a lead on one of Nokia’s top data science teams; within this role he helped integrate deep learning into a commercially available products. One of Mr. Drooghaag’s current focus is the Nokia Analytics Platform, an AI platform specifically designed for Digital Service Providers.