SPEAKER: Dr. Ioannis Tomkos, has the rank of Full Professor at Athens Information Technology Center, where he serves as its Associate Dean (since 2004) and is an Adjunct Faculty at the Information Networking Institute of Carnegie-Mellon University, USA. In the past (1999 - 2002) he held a senior scientist position at Corning Inc. USA. He joined AIT in 2002 where he founded and serves as the Head of the “High Speed Networks and Optical Communication (NOC)” Research Group that was/is involved in many EU funded research projects (including 5 running FP7 projects) within which Dr. Tomkos is representing AIT as Principal Investigator and has a consortium-wide leading role (e.g. Project Leader of the EU ICT STREP project DICONET, Technical Manager of the EU IST STREP project TRIUMPH, Chairman of the EU COST 291 project, WP leader of many other projects). Dr. Tomkos has received the prestigious title of “Distinguished Lecturer” of IEEE Communications Society for the topic of transparent optical networking. Together with his colleagues and students he has authored about 270 peer-reviewed archival articles (over 140 IEEE sponsored), including about 75 Journal publications. Dr. Tomkos has served as the Chair of the International Optical Networking Technical Committee of IEEE Communications Society and the Chairman of the IFIP working group on “Photonic Networking”. He is currently the Chairman of the OSA Technical Group on Optical Communications. He has been General Chair, Technical Program Chair, Subcommittee Chair, Symposium Chair or/and member of the steering/organizing committees for the major conferences (e.g. OFC, ECOC, IEEE GlobeCom, IEEE ICC, ONDM, etc.) in the area of telecommunications/networking (more than 50 conferences/workshops). In addition he is a member of the Editorial Boards of the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology, the OSA Journal of Optical Networking, the IET Journal on Optoelectronics, and the International Journal on Telecommunications Management.