Keynotes Speaker:

Prof.Erik Bohlin

Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

Erik Bohlin is Professor at the Department of Technology Management & Economics at Chalmers University of Technology. He has published in a number of areas relating to the information society - policy, strategy, and management. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Telecommunications Policy. He is a Member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering and obtained his graduate degree in Business Administration and Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics (1987) and his Ph.D. at Chalmers University of Technology (1995).

Speech Title：Telecommunication Economics, Policy & Regulation—Legacy and Future of a Research Field

Abstract：Telecommication policy is an active research field since more than 50 years, starting with economics but increasingly inter-disciplinary. This presentation will address new influences to this discourse, such as innovation economics. The presentation will address market design for 5G and platform regulation. The presentation will also provide an overview of one of the main journals in the field, Telecommunications Policy.

Keywords：Telecommunications policy, digital policy & economics, telecommunication economics, innovation economics, economics of technology

Prof.Alessandro Bazzi

University of Bologna, Italy

Alessandro Bazzi received the Laurea degree (with honors) and the Ph.D. degree in telecommunications engineering both from the University of Bologna, where he is now an Associate Professor.

His activity is conducted within national and international projects and his research interests include performance investigation through field trials, analysis, and simulation of wireless systems and heterogeneous networks, with particular emphasis on medium access control, radio resource management, and routing. Recently, his studies focused on wireless technologies applied to automated and connected vehicles.

He is author of more than one hundred publications in the field of wireless networks and collaborates to the organization of various international journals and conferences. He is the Chief Editor of Hindawi Mobile Information Systems.

More information at www.alessandrobazzi.com.

Speech Title：Our cars started talking: wireless communications for connected vehicles

Abstract：The automotive industry is undergoing a complete revolution, in which vehicles will be fully connected and will cooperate in their manoeuvres. The main goal is and must be to achieve the "vision zero", which imagines a world where no more people die on the road. Emissions and travel time reduction are also important goals. Connectivity will be provided by both infrastructure-based and direct communications. The long-range cellular network (from LTE to 5G and beyond) is in fact widely deployed; however, despite continuous improvements, even specifically designed for the automotive sector, it still hardly guarantees ubiquitous coverage and may suffer in crowded areas. A complementary solution is the use of direct communications, meaning IEEE 802.11p and C-V2X sidelink, which today mainly target the bands reserved in many countries around 5.9 GHz and will be extended to millimeter waves in the future. Standards are partly already available and some of the technologies are ready and tested even on a large scale. Nevertheless, deployment is still at an early stage, except for non-time-critical applications, with reasons that go beyond technical. Moreover, what is currently available is considered insufficient for the challenges of the future. In this keynote, the focus will be on wireless communications for direct communication between vehicles, with an overview of what is available today, of what we will see in an early future, and on some of the research trends that are expected to merit attention in the coming years.

Keywords：Cooperative connected automated mobility; wireless communications for connected vehicles; sidelink; high mobility networks; distributed radio resource management.

Prof Aniket Mahanti

University of Auckland, New Zealand

Dr. Aniket Mahanti is a Senior Lecturer (North America: Associate Professor) of computer science at University of Auckland, New Zealand. He received his B.Sc. (Honours) in computer science from University of New Brunswick, Saint John in 2004. Later he moved to Calgary to pursue graduate studies and completed his Master's in 2006. He worked as a research associate for 2 years, and enrolled in the doctoral program in University of Calgary in 2008. He graduated with a Ph.D. in computer science in 2012. Since then, he has been working in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland. Aniket's post-secondary education was fully funded by competitive national scholarships like NSERC CGS and AITF graduate student scholarship. Aniket brings in over 10 years of technical experience in Information technology and distributed systems. He regularly consults for top technology firms from around the world to help them better manage their Information Technology resources. Aniket has extensive teaching experience in several disciplines, including, computer science, mathematics, and business. His research interests are in the general area of computer networking with an emphasis on Internet measurements and performance evaluation. Aniket's research has appeared in top peer-reviewed conferences and journals.

Prof. Dr.Roumen Kountchev

Sofia Technical University, Bulgaria

Roumen Kountchev, Ph.D., D. Sc. is a professor at the Faculty of Telecommunications, Department of Radio Communications and Video Technologies at the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria.

His scientific areas of interest are: digital signal and image processing, image compression, multimedia watermarking, video communications, pattern recognition and neural networks. Prof. Kountchev has 341 papers published in magazines and conference proceedings (71 international); 15 books; 46 book chapters; 20 patents (3 international). He had been principle investigator of 38 research projects (6 international).

At present he is a member of Euro Mediterranean Academy of Arts and Sciences (EMAAS) and President of Bulgarian Association for Pattern Recognition (member of Intern. Association for Pattern Recognition). Editorial board member of: Intern. Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems; Intern. Journal Broad Research in Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience; KES Focus Group on Intelligent Decision Technologies; Egyptian Computer Science Journal; Intern. Journal of Bio-Medical Informatics and e-Health, and Intern. Journal Intelligent Decision Technologies. He has been a plenary speaker at: WSEAS Intern. Conf. on Signal Processing 2009, Istanbul; WSEAS Intern. Conf. on Signal Processing, Robotics and Automation, University of Cambridge 2010, UK; WSEAS Intern. Conf. on Signal Processing, Computational Geometry and Artificial Vision 2012, Istanbul, Turkey; Intern. Workshop on Bioinformatics, Medical Informatics and e-Health 2013, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt; Workshop SCCIBOV 2015, Djillali Liabès University, Sidi Bel Abbès, Algérie; Intern. Conf. on Information Technology 2015 and 2017, Al Zayatoonah University, Amman, Jordan; WSEAS European Conf. of Computer Science 2016, Rome, Italy.