Women in Engineering and IoT Forum
| Time | Women in Engineering and IoT Forum |
| Friday, June 25th
10:30-12:30 EST |
WIoT1: All Things Spectrum in a Wirelessly Connected World
Chair: Muriel Medard |
| Friday, June 25th
12:30-13:30 EST |
Lunch Break |
| Friday, June 25th
13:30-15:30 EST |
WIoT2: Leadership: Insights, Experience, and Lessons Learned from Leading Women in Business, Technology, and Academia
Chair: Karen I. Matthews |
WIoT1 – Session June 25th, 2021 10:30am – 12:30pm EST
All Things Spectrum in a Wirelessly Connected World
Description
As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes the dominant consumer of spectrum, the underlying model of spectrum use is not only evolving but is changing rapidly in fundamental ways. Correspondingly, the need to improve the use and allocation of spectrum is becoming more urgent. Spectrum is crucial both for communications and for sensing in new ways that affect societal and economic goals across the planet. Allocating spectrum in flexible, adaptable ways, by learning from the communications, sensing, and the natural environment, and revisiting legacy physical layer techniques and network protocols that are wasteful, are some of the areas that offer opportunities for better management of spectrum as a resource. In this context, hardware developments, co-development of communications, computing, and storage, regulatory issues and the rapid pace of technological evolution are tightly intertwined. Additionally, machine learning algorithms offer unique potential for conquering the inherent complexity in effectively managing spectrum use in dramatically better ways. Please join our Women in Engineering and IoT Forum as we discuss these issues with our panel of leading practitioners and experts.
Chair
Muriel Medard, Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), MIT, Cambridge MA USA
Muriel Médard is the Cecil H. and Ida Green Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department at MIT, where she leads the Network Coding and Reliable Communications Group in the Research Laboratory for Electronics at MIT. She obtained three bachelor’s degrees (EECS 1989, Mathematics 1989 and Humanities 1991), as well as her M.S. (1991) and Sc.D. (1995), all from MIT. She is a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering (elected 2020), a Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors (elected 2018), and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (elected 2008). Muriel was elected president of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 2012 and served on its board of governors for eleven years. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Technical University of Munich (2020).
She was co-winner of the MIT 2004 Harold E. Egerton Faculty Achievement Award and was named a Gilbreth Lecturer by the US National Academy of Engineering in 2007. She received the 2017 IEEE Communications Society Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award and the 2016 IEEE Vehicular Technology James Evans Avant Garde Award. She received the 2019 Best Paper award for IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, the 2018 ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Paper Award, the 2009 IEEE Communication Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, the 2009 William R. Bennett Prize in the Field of Communications Networking, the 2002 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Prize Paper Award, as well as eight conference paper awards. Most of her prize papers are co-authored with students from her group.
She has served as technical program committee co-chair of ISIT (twice), CoNext, WiOpt, WCNC and of many workshops. She has chaired the IEEE Medals committee, and served as member and chair of many committees, including as inaugural chair of the Millie Dresselhaus Medal. She was Editor in Chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications and has served as editor or guest editor of many IEEE publications, including the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, and the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. She was a member of the inaugural steering committees for the IEEE Transactions on Network Science and for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory.
Muriel received the inaugural 2013 MIT EECS Graduate Student Association Mentor Award, voted by the students. She set up the Women in the Information Theory Society (WithITS) and Information Theory Society Mentoring Program, for which she was recognized with the 2017 Aaron Wyner Distinguished Service Award. She served as undergraduate Faculty in Residence for seven years in two MIT dormitories (2002–2007). She was elected by the faculty and served as member and later chair of the MIT Faculty Committee on Student Life and as inaugural chair of the MIT Faculty Committee on Campus Planning. She was chair of the Institute Committee on Student Life. She was recognized as a Siemens Outstanding Mentor (2004) for her work with High School students. She serves on the Board of Trustees since 2015 of the International School of Boston, for which she is treasurer.
She has over fifty US and international patents awarded, the vast majority of which have been licensed or acquired. For technology transfer, she has co-founded three companies, CodeOn, for which she consults, Chocolate Cloud, on whose board she serves, and Steinwurf, for which she is Chief Scientist. Muriel has supervised over 40 master students, over 20 doctoral students and over 25 postdoctoral fellows.
Panelists
Yasmin Mostofi, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA USA
Yasamin Mostofi received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. She is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara. Yasamin is the recipient of the Antonio Ruberti Prize from the IEEEControl Systems Society, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, and the IEEE Outstanding Engineer Award of Region 6 (more than 10 Western U.S. states), among other awards. She was a semi-plenary speaker at the 2018 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) and akey note speaker at the 2018 Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED). Her current research thrusts include RF sensing, X-ray vision for robots, occupancy analytics with everyday communication signals, see-through imaging, person identification, and activity recognition with WiFi, communication-aware robotics, and human-robot networks. Her research has appeared in several reputable news venues such as BBC, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, Engadget, TechCrunch, NSF Science360, ACM News, and IEEE Spectrum, among others. She is a fellow of IEEE.
Dina Katabi, Department of Electrical Engineering and ComputerScience, MIT, Cambridge, MA USA
Dina Katabi is the Andrew & Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and the Director of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing. Professor Katabi is a MacArthur Fellow and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. She received her PhD and MS degrees from MIT in 2003 and 1999, and her Bachelor of Science from Damascus University in 1995. Her research interests span wireless and mobile systems, health IoT, and applied machine learning. She develops new technologies, algorithms, and systems that provide non-invasive health monitoring, enable smart homes, improve WiFi and cellular performance, and deliver new applications that are not feasible given today’s technologies. She has received multiple prestigious awards including the ACM Prize in Computing, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, two SIGCOMM Test of Time Awards, a Sloan Fellowship, the IEEE William R. Bennett prize, and multiple best paper awards. Several start-ups have been spun out of Katabi’s lab such as PiCharging and Emerald.
Ariela Zeira, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel Labs, San Diego, CA USA
Ariela Zeira has joined Intel in 2016 and recently moved to Intel Labs, Wireless Communication Research, where she drives forward looking research in the area of future networks. Ariela’s previous roles at Intel include leading the Client Connectivity Innovation team at Intel’s Client Computing Group and the Technology Planning and Strategy group at Intel’s Communications and Devices Group. Prior to joining Intel Ariela served as a Vice President, Engineering at InterDigital. She has a proven track record of leading technology and product teams in areas such as cellular, video, and analytics, including on numerous occasions being the first to introduce new technologies to the market. Ariela obtained her undergraduate and graduate EE degrees from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) and obtained her PhD degree in EE at Yale University with a thesis in the area of estimation theory. She holds over 200 issued US patents mostly in the areas of signal processing and wireless communications.
Lisa Guess, Senior Vice President, Global Sales Engineering, Cradlepoint, Denver, CO USA
Lisa is the SVP, Global Sales Engineering at Cradlepoint. Lisa has notable technology experience and is recognized in sales engineering circles for her global leadership and endless energy to up-ramp large diverse teams in rapid growth environments. Prior to Cradlepoint Lisa was the VP of Sales Engineering at Juniper and served in other leadership roles at Atrica/Nokia Siemens, Nortel, Bay Networks, Wellfleet Communications and Shell Oil Company. She holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, as well as a M.B.A. in Business Administration.
Andreia Cathelin, Technology R&D Fellow, STMicrolectronics, Crolles, France
Andreia Cathelin (M’04, SM’11) started electrical engineering studies at the Polytechnic Institute of Bucarest, Romania and graduated with MS from the Institut Supérieur d’Electronique du Nord (ISEN),Lille, France in 1994. In 1998 and 2013 respectively,she received PhD and “habilitation à diriger desrecherches” (French highest academic degree) from the Université de Lille 1, France.
Since 1998, she has been with STMicroelectronics, Crolles, France, now Technology R&D Fellow. Her focus areas are in the design of RF/mmW/THz and ultra-low-power circuits and systems. She is the key design scientist in the promotion of all advanced CMOS technologies developed in the company.
She is leading and driving research in advanced topics inside the company R&D program and through leadership cooperation with major universities around the world. She has also management activities as being in charge of the ST-CMP operation (the CMP is an independent organization offering small series foundry services for SME and research institutes).
Andreia is very active in the IEEE community since more than 15 years, strongly implied with SSCS and its Adcom, the Executive Committees of ISSCC and VLSI Symposium and is the TPC chair of ESSCIRC2020/21 in Grenoble. She is as well a founding member of the IEEE SSCS Women in Circuits group.
Andreia has authored or co-authored 150+ technical papers and 14 book chapters, has co-edited the Springer book “The Fourth Terminal, Benefits of Body-Biasing Techniques for FDSOI Circuits and Systems” and has filed more than 25 patents.
Andreia is a co-recipient of the ISSCC 2012 Jan Van Vessem Award for Outstanding European Paper and of the ISSCC 2013 Jack Kilby Award for Outstanding Student Paper. She is as well the winner of the 2012 STMicroelectronics Technology Council Innovation Prize, for having introduced on the company’s roadmap the integrated CMOS THz technology for imaging applications.
Very recently, Andreia has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Lund, Sweden, promotion of 2020.
Martha Suarez, President, Dynamic Spectrum Alliance, Beaverton, OR USA
Martha Suarez was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia. She received her degree as Electronics Engineer from the Universidad Industrial de Santander in 2004. During her undergraduate studies she participated in an exchange program with the Ecole Superieure Chimie Physique Electronique de Lyon, France in 2001. She received her master’s degree in high frequency communication systems from the University of Marne-la-Vallee, France in 2006 and her Ph.D. degree from the University Paris-Est in 2009. She joined the department of Telecommunications and Signal Processing at the École Supérieure d’Ingénieurs en Électronique et Électrotechniquede Paris ESIEE and the Esycom Research Center where she worked on wireless transmitter architectures. In 2011 she was awarded with a Marie Curie Fellowship and worked at the InstytutTechnologii Elektronowej ITE in Poland for the Partnership for Cognitive Radio Par4CREuropean Project. Her research interests were in the areas of wireless system architectures and the design of high-performance Radio Frequency RF transceivers. Since 2013 she joined the National Spectrum Agency in Colombia, ANE, where she worked as Senior Adviser to the General Director and supported international activities of the Agency. Afterwards, in December2015, she became the General Director of ANE and continued promoting the efficient use of the Spectrum and the mobile broadband connectivity in Colombia. Since the 1st of May 2019,Martha Suarez is the President of the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance DSA, a global organization advocating for laws and regulations that will lead to more efficient and effective spectrum utilization, which is essential to addressing key worldwide social and economic challenges.
Sujata Banerjee, Senior Director of Research, VmWare, Palo Alto, CA USA
Sujata is a Sr. Director of Research at VMware. Her expertise is in topics related to software defined networking and network functions virtualization, and she is broadly interested in network automation and performance. Prior to joining VMware, she was a distinguished technologist and research director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs, leading a network systems research group which conducted research on enterprise, service provider and datacenter networks. Prior to her industrial research career, she also held a tenured Associate Professor position at the University of Pittsburgh. She is serving as the technical program co-chair of the ACM SIGCOMM 2020 conference. She served as the technical co-chair of the 2018 USENIXNSDI and the 2017 ACM Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR) conferences and the general chair of ACM HotNets 2017 . She has been on the technical program committees of several conferences such as ACM SIGCOMM, ACM CoNEXT, ACM HotNets, USENIX NSDI, IEEEICNP and IEEE Infocom. . She received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California (USC) and the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology(IIT) Bombay in Electrical Engineering. She holds 37 US patents and is a recipient of the U.S.National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in networking research and two best paper awards. She also serves on the Corporate Advisory Board of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Starting July 2019, she is a member of the Computing Community Consortium(CCC) Council of the Computing Research Association (CRA). She was honored to be named in the list of 2018 N2Women: Stars in Computer Networking and Communications.
WIoT2 – Session June 25th, 2021 01:30pm – 03:30pm EST
Leadership: Insights, Experience, and Lessons Learned from Leading Women in Business, Technology, and Academia
Description
The Women in Engineering and IoT Forum addresses important aspects of supporting women pursuing careers in IoT. The Forum provides opportunities for an open dialogue about the central role of continuous skill, career and relationship building. The focus is on practical skills (such as time management, goal-setting, and financial planning), technical skills (such as AI/ML, deep learning, robotics and systems engineering), programmatic skills (program and product management, agile innovation, and technology transfer), and entrepreneurial skills (selling ideas, raising funds, developing a sense of strategy, and on understanding of risk and governance). The panel will provide a safe venue to openly discuss some of the key questions many women have regarding career growth and development in the fields within IoT. These skills are applicable in many different settings that range from what it takes to succeed in academic careers, to advancing in a corporate or public sector environment, to launching and nurturing a startup.
What is it like to be a woman in IoT? You’ll have a wonderful opportunity to learn all about it from our panel of experts, who will describe the challenges and opportunities in their careers, as well as a personal reflection on what it takes to succeed. Come and enjoy an engaging discussion with plenty of time allowed for your own questions within this two-hour panel discussion.
Please join us if you are just launching your career, taking the next step, making a transition, or well along your path and are willing to share your experiences.
Chair
Karen I. Matthews, CEO, Purpose-Driven Consulting, South Windsor, CT USA
Karen Matthews, a native of Baltimore, MD, began her academic career at the US Naval Academy, received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Morgan State University and a MEng and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MBA, all from Cornell University.
Karen is the Founder and CEO of Purpose-Driven Consulting (PDC). Prior to PDC, she held senior positions in Corning Incorporated’s Science & Technology Division in opto-electronic packaging as a research and then senior research scientist, most recently working in early innovation stage markets and technologies for the optical communications sector to identify and help implement new growth opportunities in both wired (fiber, cable and connectivity) and wireless. Her focus on moving concepts through to commercialization remains, with a current emphasis on Digital Transformation, 5G, the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 Innovation.
Dr. Matthews has authored numerous publications and patents and is a member of several technical and professional organizations. She has served as an Executive Board member of Georgia Tech’s Center for the Development and Application of Internet of Things Technologies (CDAIT) – sitting on the Research Work Group and leading the Thought Leadership Work Group therein. Most recently, she has been invited as keynote speaker, moderator, panelist and open forum discussion leader at various 5G, Internet of Things and smart manufacturing conferences. She has Chaired the OFC 2020 N5 Market Watch, developing the programming for Market Watch, Network Operators Summit and Data Center Summit, and continues as an active subcommittee member for 2021 as well as co-chair of the 2021 IEEE World Forum track on Communications and Networking. She is an Executive Board member of The Upskill Foundation, a non-profit focusing on upskilling underrepresented groups in data science.
Panelists
Ruicong Zhi, School of Computer & Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology, Beijing
Ruicong Zhi is a professor in School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing. Her research interests mainly include facial and behavior analysis, artificial intelligence, and sensory analysis. She visited the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in 2008 as a joint PhD, and received her PhD in signal and information processing from Beijing Jiaotong University in 2010. From 2016~2017, she visited the University of South Florida as a visiting scholar. She is the recipient of the National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Nomination Award (2013), and Wide Concern Achievement Award in IoT of Beijing (2020). She is a member of ISO TC34/SC12 committee, Chinese Image and Graphics Society, Intelligent Medical Committee of Artificial Intelligence Society, and the chairman of Youth Committee of Internet of Things Society. She has undertaken several National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) projects, and published more than 80 papers and patents. Her related research has been recognized by experts in the computer science field at the top international conference ECCV. She has also been invited to publish a review article in The Visual Computer.
Jeannette M. Wing, Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, New York, NY USA
Jeannette M. Wing is Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Her current research interests are in trustworthy AI. Her areas of research expertise include security and privacy, formal methods, programming languages, and distributed and concurrent systems. She is widely recognized for her intellectual leadership in computer science, and more recently in data science. Wing’s seminal essay, titled “Computational Thinking,” was published more than a fifteen years ago and is credited with helping to establish the centrality of computer science to problem-solving in all other disciplines.
Wing came to Columbia from Microsoft, where she served as Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research, overseeing research labs worldwide. Before joining Microsoft, she was on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, where she served as Head of the Department of Computer Science and as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the School of Computer Science. During a leave from Carnegie Mellon, she served at the National Science Foundation as Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, where she oversaw the federal government’s funding of academic computer science research. Wing has been recognized with distinguished service awards from the Computing Research Association and the Association for Computing Machinery. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. She holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from MIT.
Hanna Bogucka, Chair of Wireless Communications, Poznań University of Technology, Poznań, Head of Cooperation RIMEDO Labs, Poland.
Hanna Bogucka received the Ph.D. degree with honors and the Doctor Habilitus degree in Telecommunications from Poznan University of Technology (PUT), Poznan, Poland in 1995 and 2006 respectively. Currently, she is a full professor and the Director of the Institute of Radiocommunications at PUT. Moreover, prof. Bogucka is the co-founder, Board Member and the Head of Cooperation of RIMEDO Labs, a successful startup and the spin-off from PUT.
Prof. Bogucka is involved in the research activities in the area of wireless communications: radio resource management, cognitive radio, and green-communication. She has been involved in multiple European 5th – 7th Framework Programme and Horizon 2020 projects, European COST actions, National Science Centre projects, and industry cooperation.
Prof. Bogucka is the author of 200 research papers, 3 handbooks in the area of radio communications and digital signal processing (in Polish) and 3 scientific monographs on flexible and cognitive radio.
Prof. Bogucka has been appointed IEEE Communications Society Director of the EAME Region (Europe, Africa, Middle East) and elected IEEE Radio Communications Committee Chair for the term of 2015-2016. Currently, she is the IEEE ComSoc Fog/Edge Industry Community Regional Chair in Europe and the member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Aawatif Hayar, President at Université Hassan II de Casablanca, Casablanca, Morocco
Dr. Aawatif HAYAR is currently the President at the Université Hassan II de Casablanca. Asthe first Moroccan, she received the degree of “Agrégation” in Electrical Engineering from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan in 1992, with honors. She received the “Diplôme d’EtudesApprofondies” in Signal processing Image and Communications and the degree of Engineer in Telecommunications Systems and Networks from ENSEEIHT de Toulouse in 1997. Aawatif then received her Ph.D. degree in Signal Processing and Telecommunications from Institut National Polytechnique in Toulouse in 2001 with honors. She was a research and teaching associate at EURECOM’s Mobile Communication Department from 2001 to 2010 in Sophia Antipolis, France. Aawatif Hayar was awarded an HDR (Habilitation à Diriger la Recherche)from University Sud Toulon Var in France on Cognitive Wideband Wireless Systems in 2010and an HDR in Green Téléommunication from University Hassan II Casablanca in 2013.
Since 2011, Aawatif Hayar has been a Professor at the University Hassan II Casablanca. She is also member of Casablanca “Avant-garde” City think-tank. She is a Co-Initiator of the E-madina Smart City Cluster founded in 2013. Her research interests include fields such as cognitive green communications systems, UWB systems, smart grids, smart sustainable social building, e-governance, open data for citizens, smart cities, ICT for social eco-friendly smart socio-economic development.
Professor Aawatif Hayar is also the IEEE DLT Chair for the EMEA region since 2014 and the designer of Frugal Social Sustainable Smart City concept for Casablanca and emerging countries which was selected by IEEE Smart City initiative as one of the most innovative projects in the world in 2015. Professor Aawat if Hayar is currently the Chair of the Casablanca IEEE Core Smart City project. She was also selected by the prestigious African Innovation Foundation as one of the top ten innovative African women in 2015. Aawat if Hayar has developed “Frugal Social Collaborative Sustainable Smart City Casablanca“, a new concept for smart city transformation which was distinguished by IEEE Smart city initiative in 2015 as an innovative cost effective inclusive smart city concept. She is the Scientific Advisor, at the City level, of Smart City Expo Casablanca. Pr. Aawatif Hayar is currently leading or involved in a couple ofR&D/Innovation projects with the City of Casablanca, the region Casablanca Settat, CNRST,INDH, GIZ and Heinrich Böll Stiftung such as End to End Energy Efficiency Living Lab,Virtual Museum of Casablanca, e-douar “Smart Inclusive Ecological village” and SolarDecathlon Africa E-Co Dar projects.
Sheryl Genco, Director, Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, NTIA, Boulder, CO USA
Dr. Sheryl M. Genco has over 30 years of experience in engineering and management and is a member of the Senior Executive Service of the Federal Government in her role as the Director of National Telecommunication and Information Administration’s (NTIA), Institute of Telecommunication Sciences: The Nation’s Spectrum and Communication Lab. She has held technical and management positions at a wide range of organizations including Honeywell Corporation, IBM, Ball Aerospace, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Her career has focused on the development of new technologies and moving research into operation. Prior to joining NTIA, Dr. Genco was the Senior Research and Development Manager for Engineering at Honeywell Quantum Solutions, where she led an organization developing systems for quantum computing based on trapped ions. At NIST, she led the National Advanced Spectrum and Communications Test Network, managing programs in the areas of wireless communications (LTE), 3.5GHz, GPS, AWS-3. While at NIST, Dr. Genco won the prestigious Department of Commerce Gold Medal with her team. She co-founded an engineering R&D company that developed synthetic precise nanomaterials for lunar simulants for NASA, glass fiber manufacturing processes, microsphere production and other applications. Dr. Genco also founded a STEM focused K-8 public school that has won multiple awards, including the prestigious John Irwin School of Excellence award. The school has educated more than 13,000 students in its decade and a half of continuous operation. Dr. Genco is an IEEE Senior member and received a Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. degrees in electrical engineering.