Keynote Speakers

Giovanni Geraci , Telefonica Research and UPF Barcelona

Giovanni Geraci is a Principal Research Scientist at Telefonica and an Associate Professor and the Head of Telecommunications at Univ. Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He was previously with Nokia Bell Labs and holds a dozen patents on wireless technologies. He serves as Distinguished Lecturer for two IEEE societies and the impact of his contributions has been recognized with the IEEE ComSoc Outstanding Young Researcher Award for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Two of his publications, including a book, are listed in the IEEE ComSoc Best Readings, two more received IEEE Best Paper Awards, and his research has featured three times on “La Vanguardia”, the leading newspaper in Catalonia, Spain.

Marc Dacier, KAUST Univeristy Saudi Arabia

Marc Dacier is a full professor of Computer Science (CS) and the associate director of the Resilience Computing and Cybersecurity research Center (RC3) at King Abdullah University of Sciences and Technology, Saudi Arabia. Dr. Dacier obtained his Ph.D. from INPT in 1994 from his work done at LAAS, CNRS, in Toulouse (France). Since then, he has had a balanced career between industry and academia. After his thesis, he worked for one year as a security consultant in Paris, France, for France Telecom and the French ministry of interior. In 1996, he joined IBM Research in Zurich (Switzerland) to create the Global Security Analysis Laboratory (GSAL). In 2002, he became a professor at Eurecom. In 2008, he joined Symantec to build its European Research Labs. Later, he spent two years in the USA to manage all the collaborative research projects, worldwide. In that role, he was in charge of teams in France, Ireland, and in the United States. He was also the university relationship manager for Symantec Research Labs, worldwide. In 2014, he became the director of the cybersecurity research group at QCRI, in Qatar, where he lived for 3 years. In October 2017, Dr. Dacier came back to EURECOM to become the head of the Digital Security department and a full professor until June 2021 when he joined KAUST. An internationally recognized expert in cybersecurity, Dr. Dacier has served on more than 120 program committees of all major security and dependability conferences and as a member of the editorial board of several top-tier technical peer-reviewed journals

Mohamad Assaad, Laboratory of Signals and Systems (L2S), CentraleSupelec, University of Paris-Saclay

Mohamad Assaad received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in telecommunications from Telecom ParisTech, Paris, France, in 2002 and 2006, respectively. Since 2006, he has been with the Telecommunications Department, CentraleSupelec, University of Paris-Saclay, where he is currently a professor. He is also a Researcher with the Laboratoire des Signaux et Systèmes (CNRS) and was the 5G Chair Holder between 2017 and 2021. He has coauthored one book and more than 150 publications in journals and conference proceedings. He has served as TPC member or TPC co-chair for various top-tier international conferences, including TPC co-chair for IEEE WCNC’21, IEEE Globecom’20 Mobile and Wireless networks Symposium Co-chair, etc. He has served also as Editor for several international journals, including editor for the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters between 2017 and 2022, Guest Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, etc. He has also given in the past successful tutorials on topics related to 5G systems, and Age of Information at various IEEE conferences. His research interests include 5G and 6G systems, fundamental networking aspects of wireless systems, Age of Information and semantic communications, resource optimization and machine learning in wireless networks.