As OPNFV Director, Heather Kirksey works with the community to advance the adoption and implementation of open source NFV platform. She oversees and provides guidance for all aspects of the project, from technology to community and marketing and reports to OPNFV board of directors. Before Joining the Linux Foundation, Kirksey led strategic technology alliances for MongoDB. Earlier in her career she held various leadership positions in the telecom industry including running a partner program for CPE, doing solutions marketing for the IP Division at Alcatel-Lucent, business development, and participating in numerous standards activities. She received her master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Texas, Austin.
The Texas Radio Terminator (TRT) team was formed on the Southern Methodist University in Taos campus and is comprised of graduate and undergraduate students from the university’s electrical engineering and computer science and engineering programs. Led by Professor Joseph Camp, the team brings a diverse background in drone flight control and related software, Software Defined Radio (SDR) design, and 3D printing.
TRT members first met during an EE/CSE course, “Measurement Study Design with Phones and Drones,” led by Professor Camp. Although the group has only officially been working together since June 2017, they have a wealth of experiences to draw on from their collective efforts to secure an SDR platform running on a quadcopter. The team is engaged and extremely motivated by the challenges presented by the DARPA SDR Hackfest.
Pierre de Vries is an Executive Fellow and Co-director of the Spectrum Policy Initiative at Silicon Flatirons. His current work focuses on maximizing the value of radio operation by managing potential and actual interference better, both before and after rulemaking. He is also Visiting Senior Scientist at the Institute for Networked Systems of RWTH Aachen University. He was a Technology Advisor to Harris Wiltshire & Grannis LLP, Washington DC (2007–2010), and Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication of the University of Southern California (2006–2007). Prior to these engagements, he held various positions at Microsoft including Chief of Incubation and Senior Director of Advanced Technology and Policy. He holds a B.Sc. (Honours) from Stellenbosch University and a D.Phil. in theoretical physics from the University of Oxford.
Amie Stepanovich works to ensure that laws and policies on surveillance and cybersecurity recognize and respect human rights. At Access Now, Amie manages and develops the organization’s U.S. policy and leads global projects at the intersection of human rights and government surveillance. Previously, Amie was the Director of the Domestic Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, where she testified in hearings in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as in State legislatures. Amie is a board member of the Internet Education Foundation. She was a liaison to the American Bar Association’s Cybersecurity Working Group and co-chaired the 2014 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference. Amie was named as a Privacy Ambassador by the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada, and was recognized in 2014 as one of Forbes magazine’s 30 under-30 leaders in Law and Policy. She has a J.D. degree from New York Law School, and a B.S. from the Florida State University.
Linda Doyle is the Director of CONNECT and Professor of Engineering and the Arts in Trinity College, University of Dublin, Ireland. CONNECT is a national research center focused on future networks and communications and is co-funded by Science Foundation Ireland and industry. CONNECT is headquartered in Trinity College and includes more than ten different academic institutions in Ireland. Doyle’s expertise is in the fields of wireless communications, cognitive radio, reconfigurable networks, spectrum management and creative arts practices. She has raised over 80 million euros in research funding in the past decade and has published widely in her field. Prof. Doyle has a reputation as an advocate for change in spectrum management practices and has played a role in spectrum policy at the national and international levels. Currently she is a member of the National Broadband Steering Committee in Ireland, and is a member of the Ofcom Spectrum Advisory Board in the UK. Prof. Doyle is on the advisory board of Wireless@KTH in Sweden. She is a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. She is on the Board of the Festival of Curiosity—an annual STEM outreach activity for children based in Dublin City Centre. She is a judge in the BT Young Scientist, Ireland’s premier science competition for schoolchildren. And she is on the Boards of the Douglas Hyde Gallery and Pallas Studios.
Joe Grand is a product designer, hardware hacker, and the founder of Grand Idea Studio. He specializes in the invention and design of electronic devices. Formerly known as Kingpin, Joe was a member of the legendary hacker group L0pht Heavy Industries. He has spent over a decade discovering security flaws in embedded systems and teaching how to reverse engineer such systems. Joe holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Boston University and a Doctorate of Science in Technology (Honorary) degree from the University of Advancing Technology.
Parimal Kopardekar (PK) serves as NASA’s Senior Technologist for Air Transportation System where he develops concepts and technologies to increase efficiency of current operations and to enable future airspace operations. He also serves as the Principal Investigator for UAS Traffic Management (UTM) to safely enable large-scale UAS operations in the low-altitude airspace.
He managed the Safe Autonomous System Operations project, which is focused on autonomy/autonomicity in civil aviation, as part of the Airspace Operations and Safety Program. The project’s goal is to develop gate-to-gate concepts and technologies aimed at improving aircraft and airspace efficiency, capacity, mobility, and throughput, while reducing delays and enhancing overall airspace operations productivity.
He is the recipient of numerous awards: NASA Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal, NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal, NASA Ames Honors Award for Project Management, NASA Ames Engineer of the Year, and AIAA Distinguished Service Recognition Award. He has published more than 40 articles, including two that were honored with best paper awards by their respective venues.
Kopardekar holds doctoral and master’s degrees in Industrial Engineering and a Bachelor’s degree in Production Engineering. He also serves as the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Aerospace Operations.
Ben Hilburn runs the GNU Radio project, serving as the Project Lead and President of The GNU Radio Foundation. He is also the Director of Engineering at DeepSig Inc., where he works on machine learning applied to signal processing and radio. He received his B.S. degree from Virginia Tech in Computer Engineering, with minors in Mathematics and Computer Science, and then went on to become the first Hume Fellow at the Hume Center for National Security and Technology. His graduate work focused on software architectures for software radio and heterogeneous processing.
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger, and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to many magazines, websites and newspapers. He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards, and treaties. He holds an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University (UK), where he is a Visiting Professor; he is also a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.
His novels have been translated into dozens of languages. He has won the Locus, Prometheus, Copper Cylinder, White Pine and Sunburst Awards, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards.
His three latest books are Walkaway, a novel for adults (2017); In Real Life, a young adult graphic novel created with Jen Wang (2014); and Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, a business book about creativity in the Internet age (2014).
Doctorow co-founded the open source, peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, and serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, the Open Technology Fund, and the Metabrainz Foundation.
Chris Anderson is CEO of 3DR, founder and chairman of the Linux Foundation’s Dronecode Project, and founder of the DIY Drones and DIY Robocars communities, including the ArduPilot autopilot project. From 2001 through 2012, he was the Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine, which in 2009 was named Magazine of the Decade by AdWeek. Before Wired, he was with The Economist for seven years in London, Hong Kong, and New York.
Chris is the author of the New York Times bestselling books The Long Tail and Free as well as Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.
In 2005, he was named Editor of the Year by Ad Age. In 2007, Time Magazine included him among the newsmagazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. That same year, he won the Loeb Award for Business Book of the Year. In 2013, he was listed among Time Magazine’s Tech 40—The Most Influential Minds In Technology. That same year, he was listed in Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers.
Anderson founded GeekDad, BookTour, and a few other companies now lost in the mists of time. His background is in science, starting with studying computational physics and doing research at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He put that experience to good use when he worked as a journalist at the two leading scientific journals, Nature and Science, before taking the helm at WIRED magazine for nearly a dozen years.