Keynotes

Keynote #1: Intent Based Networking and Network Assurance in Next Generation Networks

Abstract: Current and future network services and applications are expected to revolutionize our society and lifestyle. At the same time, the abundant possibilities that new network technologies offer to end users, network operators and administrators have created a cumbersome network configuration process to accommodate all different stakeholders and applications. Thus, lately, there is a need to simplify the management and configuration of the network, through possibly an autonomic and automatic way. Intent Based Networking (IBN) is such a paradigm that envisions flexible, agile, and simplified network configuration with minimal external intervention. This keynote will provide details of how the IBN concept works and what are the main components to guarantee a fully autonomous IBN system (IBNS). Particular emphasis will be given in network assurance, which has as a goal to autonomously trigger corrective actions, whenever the conditions of the network do not allow to fulfill the performance requirements of its users. Finally, light will be shed on the open challenges and future directions of this novel but unexplored research area.

Bio: Aris Leivadeas is currently a Full Professor with the Department of Software and Information Technology Engineering at the École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS), University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada. From 2015 to 2018, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, at Carleton University, Ottawa Canada. In parallel, Aris worked as an intern at Ericsson and collaborated with Cisco in Ottawa, Canada. He received his diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, in 2008, the M.Sc. degree in Engineering from King’s College London, UK in 2009, and the Ph.D degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 2015. He has received the best paper award in ACM ICPE 2018 & 2023, the best paper award in IEEE iThings 21 and the best presentation award in IEEE HPSR 2020. Aris is a Senior IEEE member and associate editor in IEEE Networking Letters, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, IEEE IT Professional, and IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking. His research interests include Network Function Virtualization, Intent Based Networking, Cloud and Edge Computing, IoT, and network automation.

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Keynote #2 The Life of a Token: from Words to Bits on the Wire

Abstract: This talk will demystify the way we go from Generative Ai interactive chat to actual traffic across Processing Units clusters, for both training and inference workloads, possibly involving multiple agents. It will overview challenges and existing approaches in transformer chain performance modeling and control, request routing to distributed agents, hyperparamenter sizing, showcasing some preliminary experimental results from an academic distributed LLM testbed.

Bio: Professor and researcher specializing in communication networks, with expertise spanning routing, switching, virtualization, cloud networking, and advanced network protocols. He is currently leading and participating in multiple European and national research projects on 5G/6G, AI, edge computing, and network resilience, and has held roles as principal investigator, coordinator, and committee member on numerous initiatives. Prof. Secci teaches advanced courses at Cnam Paris and has served as the director of its Computer Science Department, contributing to several graduate programmes on computer networks and IoT systems.