INCOMs International Advisory Board
Andrew Chraplyvy, VP, NOKIA Bell Labs, Crawford Hill, NJ, USA
During his nearly 40 years at Bell Labs, Andy has acquired broad research and management experience in photonics and optical communications. He holds over 35 patents in the areas of light wave systems and fiber optics. Along with Bob Tkach, Andy invented a new type of optical fiber, NZDF, that is widely deployed in intercontinental and long-haul terrestrial networks. In addition, they are responsible for a number of inventions, for example the concept of dispersion management, that greatly increased the capacity and speed of optical networks. These inventions and technologies are found in most high-capacity networks worldwide.
Bent Hessen-Schmidt, Data Center Strategy, CA, USA
Bent works in the Architecture, Security and Network Department of a large innovative hardware, software, and services company. Before that, he was an early employee in four successful startups. Wireless Telecom Group went public (IPO) and was one of Forbes top 100 fastest growing small companies three years in a row. The three other startups, Crimp A/S, SiGe Semiconductor, and Synthesys Research were all acquired. Bent has experience in business development as well as merger and acquisition due diligence. He has also contributed to many of the Radio Access Network (RAN) and test of highspeed serial interfaces standards, which are in use today.
Piet Demeester, Professor, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at Ghent University (UGent), Belgium
Piet has experience with top-level research and development in Electrical Engineering. Piet furthermore, has management experience as group leader of the Internet Based Communication Networks and Services (IBCN) and was involved in the establishment of the strategic research centre iMinds in 2004. Since then, his team has played a key role in the further expansion of iMinds and in 2012, Piet became director of the Internet Technologies Department with 230 researchers. In 2016 his research group iLab.t was merged with two other research groups (DSLab – Ghent University and MOSAIC - University of Antwerp) to form the new research group IDLab (Internet Technology and Data Science Lab) that counts about 350 researchers and is focusing on the following key areas: electromagnetics and high speed circuit design, wireless networks, fixed networks, cloud and big data infrastructures, multimedia processing, semantic intelligence, machine learning & data mining, AI for robotics and IoT. Besides these activities, Piet and his research group have conducted the work of company start-ups, which has resulted in 6 spinout companies.