BIOS

Bios of current and recent business speakers from abroad  

Dr. Wolfgang Balzer started his career with an education in physics and a position as Assistant Professor, already working on automated measurements in optical measurement technologies and working as an consultant for test and measurement strategies. After a post-doctorate year in Japan where we worked on neural networks, he co-founded a company working in the field of industrial measurement. When this went more and more into the direction of mobile communication, in 1993 he co-founded the current Focus Infocom GmbH where he is a Managing Director since then.

Specializing in software development and Quality of Service, his role in Focus Infocom today is product and business development. With Focus Infocom, he introduced several “industry-first” technologies. Among other activities, he established one of the most renowned regular public benchmarking in Germany. He also works in standardization; “his” group, ETSI STQ Mobile is responsible for the TS 102 250 document series which is also the basis for the upcoming ITU-T E.804 recommendation. 

Dr. Jens Berger started his career at the research center of Deutsche Telekom. Since 2003, he has been with SwissQual AG, a Rohde & Schwarz company. As Head of Applied Research he is responsible for the QoE measurements in SwissQual’s product lines and objective quality prediction methods of audio and video services in telecommunication networks. In 1998 he received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany, on a thesis about objective speech quality prediction.  
For the past ten years, Dr. Berger has been Rapporteur within ITU-T SG12: “Perceptual-based objective methods for voice, audio and visual quality measurements in telecommunication services.” He is further active in ETSI, VQEG and other international standardization bodies. 

Prathima Bommakanti – Industry Analyst, Measurement & Instrumentation Bachelor’s of Engineering (Electronics and Communication Engineering). Prathima Bommakanti started her career as Research Analyst with Frost & Sullivan. Since 2004, Prathima has been focusing most of her research on general purpose test equipment, dimensional metrology, and communication test equipment markets. Her consulting projects and research studies have been focused on interpreting factors that affect market evolution to identify sources of competitive advantage, identifying economic and technical factors determining future changes, recommendations and strategic conclusions for a market defined strategy, customer/buyer analysis, identifying macro/micro market factors, , financial and market behavior of various industry sectors worldwide. She has also published a number of articles related to the various Test & Measurement sectors in the industry dealing along with performing several Movers & Shakers interviews with CEO’s of major companies in the Test & Measurement industry. 

Dr. Pedro Casas is Senior Researcher at the Telecommunications Research Center FTW Vienna in Austria. He got a Ph.D. in computer science from Telecom Bretagne - France in 2010, and joined CNRS France at the LAAS lab in Toulouse as a research fellow between 2010 and 2011. Between 2003 and 2012 he held a Research and Teaching Assistant position at the Universidad de la República (UdelaR) in Montevideo, Uruguay, working in the core of the ARTES research group - Telecommunications Department, Electrical Engineering Institute. During the past 10 years he has been involved in multiple national and international research and industrial projects in Networking.

His research domains and expertise span the monitoring and analysis of network traffic in fixed-line and cellular networks, QoE modeling and assessment, and data mining in networking. He is the main author of more than 50 papers in major international conferences and journals, and received 6 best paper awards in the last 5 years (IEEE, IFIP, ACM, ITC, EuroNGI European Network of Excellence).

Dr. Casas is technical leader in both research and industrial projects, including Quality of Experience modeling and assessment and large-scale traffic monitoring and analysis.

Neil Maitland has gained more than twenty years of commercial experience in the telecommunications sector since obtaining his Master Degree in Electronic Systems Engineering working on a diverse range of projects. This includes, for example, developing simulation software for capacity planning interconnects of a large UK mobile network operator, implementing MM on a dual-RAT mobile handset protocol stack and also co-founding a startup developing forensic data extraction devices to obtain evidence from mobile phones for law enforcement and military. Comfortable acting as a software architect, project manager and technical leader, Neil is currently Head of Engineering for Nexus Telecom’s TS business unit where he enjoys using agile development methodologies to build a variety of carrier-grade network testing and performance management tools for fixed and mobile networks.

Dr. Raimund Schatz is Key Researcher and Area Manager at the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (FTW) involved in QoE projects with Vodafone and A1 Telekom Austria. He holds an Msc. in Telematics (TU-Graz), a PhD in Informatics (TU-Vienna), an MBA and MSc. from Open University Business School (UK). Besides managing the “User-centered Interaction, Services, and Systems Quality” department, Dr. Schatz leads FTW’s research projects on Quality-of-Experience (QoE) assessment and monitoring of broadband services in wireless and wireline networks. Furthermore, he is actively engaged in various QoE-related nationally funded projects and EU-funded networking activities, including COST IC 1304 ACROSS and COST IC1003 Qualinet, as well as the organization of various QoE-related workshops and events (e.g. QoMEX 2013, ICC QoE-FI 2015, QCMAN 2016). Dr. Schatz is author of more than 100 publications and contributions to standardization in the areas of Quality of Experience, Human-Computer Interaction, Pervasive Computing and Network Performance Assessment.

Arnd Sibila joined Rohde & Schwarz in 2012 as Technology Marketing Manager for Wireless Technologies. In 2014 and 2015 he additionally led the Infrastructure Global Key Account Manager group. Since 2016 he focus on Technology Marketing for the Mobile Network Testing market segment.
Before Rohde & Schwarz his 21 years of wireless communication experience cover a range of technical engineering and management positions around the Product Lifecycle Process of Wireless Communication Systems and Mobile Networks (Product Management, Product Line Management, System Architecture, CTO, Business Development, Portfolio Management, Product Qualification) in Siemens Communications and Nokia Siemens Networks covering nearly all technologies (LTE-Advanced, LTE, WCDMA/HSPA, WiMAX, WiFi, etc.).
Arnd holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering (communication technologies, RF technology) from the Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany.

John Timms, Telchemy holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from Liverpool University. He has worked in product development for several UK-based communications equipment manufacturers including Racal, Dowty/CASE, Anite and Siemens, holding positions from Software Development Engineer through to Chief Engineer on technologies including modem network management, frame relay and ATM switching, NGN networks and CTI systems. He has managed business units responsible for bespoke Software Development Services, and is currently Region Director EMEA for Telchemy Inc, the world leader in real time monitoring of multimedia services in Next Generation Networks. John holds multiple patents in packetized voice technology, and has worked extensively in international standardization within organisations such as the Frame Relay (as Technical Director Europe) and ATM Forums, ETSI/3GPP (regarding multimedia QoS metrics), and the Telemanagement Forum, where he has been a lead editor in several SLA management technical repors and guidebooks. He also presents technical training in various IP technologies, especially VoIP, IPTV and traffic engineering.