Keynotes & Invited Talks Speakers

Prof. Saifur Rahman

Director, Virginia Tech Advanced Research Institute, USA
President, IEEE Power & Energy Society, 2018 and 2019

Talk Title:“The Smart City Building Blocks and Their Synergy with Smart Villages”<abstract>

Biography:

Professor Saifur Rahman is the founding director of the Advanced Research Institute (www.ari.vt.edu) at Virginia Tech, USA where he is the Joseph R. Loring professor of electrical and computer engineering. He also directs the Center for Energy and the Global Environment (www.ceage.vt.edu).  He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE and an IEEE Millennium Medal winner.  He is the president of the IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) for 2018 and 2019. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Electrification Magazine and the IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy. He has published over 140 journal papers and has made over four hundred conference and invited presentations.  In 2006 he served on the IEEE Board of Directors as the vice president for publications. He is a distinguished lecturer for the IEEE Power & Energy Society and has lectured on renewable energy, energy efficiency, smart grid, energy internet, blockchain, IoT sensor integration, etc. in over 30 countries.  He is the founder of BEM Controls, LLC, a Virginia (USA)-based software company providing building energy management solutions.  He served as the chair of the US National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for International Science and Engineering from 2010 to 2013. He has conducted several energy efficiency, blockchain and sensor integration projects for Duke Energy, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the US National Science Foundation, the US Department of Defense, the US Department of Energy and the State of Virginia.

Mohamed-Slim Alouini

Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Science and Engineering (CEMSE) Division
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
Thuwal, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia.

Title of Talk: “Smart Villages: When Affordable Electronics Meets Internet for All” <abstract>

Biography:

Webpage:

https://www.kaust.edu.sa/en/study/faculty/mohamed-slim-alouini

Dr. Wael Guibene

Amazon Lab126 – Sunnyvale, CA

Talk Title: “From smart homes to smart neighborhoods: a wireless perspective”

Biography:

Dr. Wael Guibene is a Wireless Systems Architect at Amazon Lab126, based in Sunnyvale, CA.
Prior to this role; he worked as a Sr. Wireless Systems Engineer at Intel working on novel RF/wireless architectures and IoT systems/protocols design. Before joining Intel, he worked for Semtech as a wireless protocol engineer on LoRa/LoRaWAN systems. Prior to that, he worked at EURECOM on EU projects related to 4G/5G.

Dr. Guibene is holding a MEng and MSc in EE/Telecommunications from ENIT, Tunisia and a PhD in Electronics and Communications from Telecom ParisTech.

Dr. Guibene published 35+ IEEE/ACM papers and holds 10+ international patents. He is a Guest Editor for many IEEE Communication Magazine and Elsevier SIs.

Dr Guibene’s research interests include 5G, M2M/IoT, and E2E system architecture and design.

Prof. Farouk Kamoun

Président de l’Université SESAME, Tunisia

Talk Title : “Smart City, Issues and Experiences” <abstract>

Biography: Pr. Farouk Kamoun received an Engineering Degree from the Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité, Paris, France in 1970 and the Ph.D. degree in computer science, in 1976, from UCLA, where he participated in the ARPA Network Project and did his research on design considerations for large computer communication networks. Upon his return to Tunisia he joined the University and also served in government agencies. He conducted and supervised research on flow and congestion control in computer networks, routing and security in ad-hoc networks and sensor networks, e-commerce, flow optimization in VANETs. His current research and interest areas deal with Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks, Internet of Things and Smart Cities.

He is currently president of SESAME university and Professor Emeritus at ENSI (National School of Computer Science) Tunisia. He is co-founder of the CRISTAL research Laboratory.He previously served as Dean of ENSI as well as chairman and CEO of the Centre National de l’Informatique, CNI, Tunisia a Government Agency in charge of IT policies, regulation and government software development.

He is an international expert in IT, education, Science and technology. He is senior member of IEEE , co-founder and president of the African e-Governance for Inclusive Development Foundation, AeGID-F, created in august 2015. He is also co-founder and vice president of IoT Tunisia a new multi-stakeholder initiative to foster the development IoT in Tunisia.

Pr.  Constantinos B. Papadias

 Athens Information Technology (AIT), Greece

Talk Title : “Modelling mmWave Channels for Fixed Wireless Access in Urban Environments”<abstract>

Biography :

Constantinos B. Papadias is the Scientific Director of Athens Information Technology (AIT), in Athens, Greece, where he is also Professor and Head of its Broadband Wireless and Sensor Networks (B-WiSE) Research Group. He is also an Adjunct professor at Aalborg University in Denmark. He received the diploma of electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1991 and the doctorate degree in signal processing (highest honors) from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST), Paris, France, in 1995. He was a researcher at Institut Eurécom (1992-1995), Stanford University (1995-1997) and Bell Labs (as a member of the technical staff from 1997-2001 and as technical manager from 2001-2006). He was also an adjunct professor at Columbia University (2004-2005) and Carnegie Mellon University (2006-2011). His research interests span several areas of advanced communication systems, with emphasis on wireless, cognitive, green and next-generation networks. He has published over 200 papers, one research monograph, two edited books, eight book chapters, and has received over 8,800 citations for his work with an h-index of 43. He has also made standards contributions and holds 12 patents. He was a member of the Steering Board of the Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF) from 2002-2006, a member and Industrial Liaison of the IEEE’s Signal Processing for Communications Technical Committee from 2003-2008 and a National Representative of Greece to the European Research Council’s IDEAS program from 2007-2008. He has served as member of the IEEE Communications Society’s Fellow Evaluation and Awards Committees, as well as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and the Journal of Communications and Networks. He has participated in several European Commission research grants, in several of which in the role of technical / research coordinator, such as HARP in the area of remote radio heads, ADEL in the area of licensed shared access and the recently kicked-off Innovative Training Network (ITN) PAINLESS on the topic of energy autonomous wireless networks. He also participated in various industrially-sponsored projects and grants related to wireless systems. He often acts as External Expert in various National funded projects, such as in the UK’s EPSRC program and in the Academy of Finland, where he recently joined a project on energy-efficient IoT networks. His distinctions include the Bell Labs President’s Award (2002); a Bell Labs Teamwork Award (2003); the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Young Author Best Paper Award (2003); ESI’s “most cited paper of the decade” citation in the area of wireless networks (2006); his recognition as a “Highly Cited Greek Scientist” (2011); and the co-authorship of two papers that earned Best Student Paper Awards at the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and BioEngineering (2013 & 2014). He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society for 2012-2013. Dr. Papadias is a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece, a Fellow of IEEE and was recently named Fellow of the European Alliance for Innovation (EAI).

Pr Rajaâ Cherkaoui El Moursli

University Mohammed V, Faculty of Science, Rabat, Morocco.
L’Oréal-UNESCO award for “Women in Science” – 2015
Resident Member of the Hassan II Academy of Science and Technology

Pr. Rajaâ Cherkaoui El Moursli is a full-time Professor of Physics at the Faculty of Sciences, University Mohammed V, Morocco, a position she has held since September 1982 after her PhD in Nuclear Physics at the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France. She worked as a head of the Laboratory of Nuclear Physics (1996-2017). This responsibility led her to develop several themes around nuclear applications. She used this opportunity to implement several masters at the university, especially the first master of medical physics in Morocco.

Pr. Cherkaoui is one of the precursors of Morocco’s official participation in the international collaboration ATLAS at the CERN in Geneva in 1996.

She was Vice-President for Research, Innovation, Cooperation and Partnership of Mohammed V University (2013 – 2017).

In 2014, she signed for a new adventure as president of the Moroccan organizing committee of the francophone competition “My thesis in 180 seconds”. As part of this competition, she was a member of the international jury of the competition final in Paris in 2015 and she organized the competition final in Rabat in 2016.

She received the L’Oreal-UNESCO award for “Women in Science” as a Laureate representing Africa and the Arab States (2015). In the same year, she became a Member of the Selection Committee for Maghreb Grant L’Oreal-UNESCO. She was also appointed member of the committee Member of the International Council of Science (ICSU) Regional Committee for Africa (2015-2019). She was elected Woman of the Year in Morocco by the magazine “Illi Des Libertés 2015”.

In 2016, InterAcademy Council/InterAcademy Partnership for Research (IAP-R) nominated her as a member of the three-years IAP-Research’s project titled “Harnessing Science, Engineering and Medicine to Address Africa’s Challenges”. The same year, she was nominated member of the Board of the Moroccan Nuclear and Radiological Safety and Security Agency and member of the Scientific Committee of the Spanish Foundation “Women for Africa” (Fundacion Mujeres por Africa).

Prof. Cherkaoui El Moursli has been honoured for her contribution and noteworthy achievements in science and technology fields in the Islamic world by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s (OIC) (2017). She also obtained the first prize of the most important publication in science and technology in “The 2nd Day of Scientific Research and Innovation of the Mohammed V University” on 26th May 2017. The same year (July 19), at the First Global Challenge in Washington, a prize with three (gold, silver and bronze) medals was named “The Rajaâ Cherkaoui El Moursli Award for Courageous Achievement” and attributed to three winning teams.

In 2018, she was designed as member of the International Awards Jury in the Physical Sciences for the L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science.

All through the years, she has supervised 16 doctoral theses and is currently supervising 3. She has been a rapporteur and a jury member of 51 theses. And she also is co-author of more than 700 indexed scientific publications and member of several committees within the university and also at national and international level.

She is a resident member of the Hassan II Academy of Sciences and Technology in Morocco. As well as a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) and of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS).

Pr. Saraju P. Mohanty

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76207, USA.

Talk Title: “Smart City – The State-of-the-Art” <abstract>

Biography:

Dr. Saraju P. Mohanty is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), University of North Texas (UNT), Denton, TX; a Tier-One (R1) Research University as per Carnegie Classification, where he directs the Smart Electronic Systems Laboratory (SESL). He received IEEE-CS-TCVLSI Distinguished Leadership Award in 2018 for services to the IEEE, and to the VLSI research community. He has been recognized as a IEEE Distinguished Lecturer by the Consumer Electronics Society (CESoc) during 2017-2018. He was conferred the Glorious India Award in 2017 for his exemplary contributions to the discipline. He received Society for Technical Communication (STC) 2017 Award of Merit for his outstanding contributions to IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine. He was the recipient of 2016 PROSE Award for best Textbook in Physical Sciences & Mathematics from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for his book titled “Nanoelectronic Mixed-Signal System Design” published by McGraw-Hill in 2015. He was conferred 2016-17 UNT Toulouse Scholars Award for sustained excellent scholarship and teaching achievements. Prof. Mohanty’s research is in “Smart Electronic Systems”. Prof. Mohanty’s research has been funded by many agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the US Air Force, the IUSSTF, and the Mission Innovation. Dr. Mohanty is an inventor of 4 US patents. Prof. Mohanty is an author of 300 peer-reviewed articles and 4 books. He has received multiple best paper awards and has delivered several keynotes the International Conferences.

Pr. Serge Miranda

University Nice Sophia Antipolis, France
Founder  of Master MBDS

Talk Title: ” Big Data management (data lakes)  for smart cities”

Biography:

Serge Miranda is a full-time Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (UNS), France, a position he has held since October 1983 after a PH-D in Toulouse University (France) and a Master thesis at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles with an INRIA Scholarship). Serge Miranda has authored or coauthored more than 100 publications and published six successful French books on databases (15 Editions) with many invited conferences around the world (in French, English and Spanish). 

He has been running a MBDS master degree and innovation laboratory (since 1992) www.mbds-fr.org devoted to data base, Big Data and mobiquitous information systems with important financial involvement of industry partners to prototype information services of the future. A genuine MBDS business model was set up between the University of Nice and key IT industry partners based upon joined tutored contracts. Several innovative wireless information cell-phone-centrics applications with communicating objects (RFID, NFC, QR Code, captors, sensors,..) were prototyped at MBDS in the area of m-payment, digital campus, health (elderly people), travel/tourism, sustainable economy (fair trade, NFC posters for illiterate, etc.).  MBDS is de facto an INNOVATION laboratory which gave the key initial impetus of Nice becoming the 1^st NFC city in Europe in 2010. MBDS has been successfully delocalized in Haiti (since 1998), Morocco (since 1998), Madagascar, Russia and Ivory Coast (2019).

Serge Miranda founded and became the first president (until 2012) of a multidisciplinary University foundation (DreamIT) on December 2009 around the MBDS kernel network. DreamIT was key in rebuilding MBDS facility in Haiti: on April 2011, was inaugurated the “first mobiquitous NFC building in America” for MBDS degree in the Science Campus of the University of Haiti in Port of Prince (the initial MBDS building was destroyed during the devastating 2010 earthquake)

After a successful MOOC in 2015 on FUN platform (From Data bases to Big Data) he launched a complete Mooc-based master degree “eMBDS” at University of Nice /UCA with Oracle as a key industrial partner. eMBDS is the first on-line Mooc-based master degree in Computer science in Europe. A start up Datum Academy has been created to enable different European on-line master degrees in the data economy. A new master degree on Artificial intelligence and big data (BIHAR) is to be launched in 2020 at ESTIA with university of Siena (Italy).

On March the 21st 1998, he was decorated (“Chevalier Ordre du Merite”) by Senator Pierre Laffitte (founder of Sophia Antipolis science park) on behalf of the Ministry of Industry of France for recognition of his original contribution between higher education and industry in the science park of Sophia Antipolis.

In 2015 he was nominated as a NFC academic expert in a patent litigation in New York (with Holwell Shuster & Goldberg LLP)

In 2019 he is nominated as a European expert on Next Generation Internet (Nexus project : https://www.ngi.eu/about/think-nexus/)

Biography: Dr. Hassan Radoine is an architecture curator, educator, and consultant. He is currently the Director of the School of Architecture, Planning and Design, University Mohammed VI Polytechnic. He worked as an expert for UNESCO, UN-Habitat, MCC, and Aga Khan Award. His research and practice are focused on sustainable and smart buildings & cities.

Biography:Née le 21 Février 1973 à Rabat.

Diplômée de l’Ecole Mohammedia des ingénieurs en 1997, section Génie Civil, Bâtiments, ponts et chaussées.

De 1997 à 2005 : a travaillé dans le secteur privé au sein d’entreprises multinationales dans le secteur du bâtiment et du génie civil (BYMARO, DELTA HOLDING).

De fin 2005 à fin 2017 : a rejoint l’équipe de l’Agence pour l’aménagement de la vallée du Bouregreg, en tant que directeur projet, puis directeur du pôle aménagements et enfin directeur général délégué de la société Bouregreg Cultures, filiale de l’Agence.

2018 : 1 an en tant que chargée de mission auprès de M. le Wali de la Région de Casablanca-Settat.

Depuis décembre 2018 : Directrice générale de la société Idmaj Sakan.