As Ericsson’s CTO, Erik Ekudden is responsible for setting the overall group strategy and technology direction for Ericsson.

His focus for the group is on strategic decisions and investments in 5G and 6G mobile systems, cloud, artificial intelligence, security and Internet of things. This builds on his decades-long career in technology strategies and industry activities with leading customers and partners. Ekudden first joined Ericsson in 1993 working on mobile systems, and rapidly moved into leadership within research and technology. He has served as research area director and vice president of technology strategy, standardization and industry.

He holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA).

John Smee is Senior Vice President of Engineering and Global Head of Wireless Research at Qualcomm, where he oversees all 5G/6G and Wi-Fi R&D projects including systems design, standards contributions, and advanced radio, hardware, and software research testbeds and technology trials with industry partners. He holds over 200 U.S. patents and received his Ph.D. in EE from Princeton University.

Jakob Hoydis is a Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA working on the intersection of machine learning and wireless communications. Prior to this, he was Head of a research department at Nokia Bell Labs, France, and co-founder of the social network SPRAED. He obtained the diploma degree in electrical engineering from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and the Ph.D. degree from Supéléc, France. From 2019-2021, he was chair of the IEEE COMSOC Emerging Technology Initiative on Machine Learning as well as Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

He is recipient of the 2019 VTG IDE Johann-Philipp-Reis Prize, the 2019 IEEE SEE Glavieux Prize, the 2018 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award, the 2015 IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize, the IEEE WCNC 2014 Best Paper Award, the 2013 VDE ITG Förderpreis Award, and the 2012 Publication Prize of the Supéléc Foundation. He has received the 2018 Nokia AI Innovation Award, as well as the 2018 and 2019 Nokia France Top Inventor Awards. He is a co-author of the textbook “Massive MIMO Networks: Spectral, Energy, and Hardware Efficiency” (2017). He is a 2023 Distinguished Industry Speaker of the IEEE Signal Processing Society as well as an IEEE Fellow.

He is one of the maintainers and core developers of Sionna, a GPU-accelerated open-source link-level simulator for next-generation communication systems.

Kailash Narayanan is the senior vice president of Keysight Technologies and president of Keysight’s Communications Solutions Group. He leads the multibillion-dollar global business that addresses the end-to-end communications industry, including wireless and wireline segments, and aerospace and defense. His team significantly contributes to accelerating technology adoptions of 5G, 400/800G, electromagnetic spectrum operations, and space and satellite modernization.

Previously, Kailash served as president of Keysight's Commercial Communications business, leading the company’s wireless and wireline test programs, and driving substantial expansion in the 5G program. Kailash championed Keysight’s outside-in approach and commitment to customer-centricity, emphasizing external partnerships and enabling customer innovation.

Kailash’s tenure with Keysight and its predecessors, Agilent, and Hewlett-Packard, spans more than 20 years. He has held different leadership positions and has been part of multiple business areas, including wireline backhaul, base stations, signal sources, wireless handsets, and fiber optics.

He holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Illinois Chicago, and a master’s degree in business administration from Walden University, Minneapolis, MN.

Dr. Tom Rondeau is the Principal Director for FutureG for the USDepartment of Defense, serving in the Office of the Undersecretaryof Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)). In this role,Dr. Rondeau is responsible for guiding the Department on research,funding, and execution of programs around warfighting capabilitiesusing future generation wireless technologies. As Principal Director,he continues to advance wireless networking concepts for nationalsecurity.

Prior to this role, Dr. Rondeau spent more than six years as a DARPA
program manager, working on numerous technology areas to improve wireless networking and communications. Some of the programs he managed include the Arrays at Commercial Timescales – Integration & Validation (ACT-IV), building software defined arrays; Hedgehog, driving towards more capable software defined radio; Domain-Specific System on Chip (DSSoC), inventing new edge and embedded processor architectures; and Data Protection in Virtual Environments (DPRIVE), enabling computing on encrypted data. Dr. Rondeau executed many other programs, ran a series of hackfests on software radio, and helped as a subject matter expert on numerous problems for the US Department of Defense and the intelligence community. His work at DARPA earned him the Distinguished Public Service Medal.

Prior to joining DARPA, Dr. Rondeau ran the GNU Radio project and consulted on wireless communications problems. In this role, Dr. Rondeau worked with many companies and organizations around the world to build solutions to difficult problems and emerging technologies and through this work helped build a large community of experts in software radio that has turned into a thriving ecosystem. He has also worked as a visiting researcher with the University of Pennsylvania and as an Adjunct with the IDA Center for Communications Research in Princeton, NJ.

Dr. Rondeau holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, and his dissertation won the Council of Graduate Schools’ 2007 Outstanding Dissertation Award in math, science, and engineering. Dr. Rondeau has spoken at numerous conferences and symposia, published extensively on software radio, and wrote one of the first books on cognitive radio.

Amitabha (Amitava) Ghosh (F’15) is a Nokia Fellow in Standards and Strategy at Nokia.

He joined Motorola in 1990 after earning his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Over a distinguished career spanning more than three decades, he has contributed to the evolution of wireless technologies from IS-95 through 5G-Advanced and is currently focused on 6G research and standardization.

Dr. Ghosh holds more than 75 issued patents, has authored numerous internal and external technical papers, and has written multiple book chapters. He is a co-author of Essentials of LTE and LTE-A and 5G Enabled Industrial IoT Networks. He currently serves as Chair of the NextG Alliance Technology Roadmap Working Group and is a member of the NGA Research Council, where he has led and contributed to key initiatives including defining audacious 6G goals, the role of vertical industries, Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), and AI/ML readiness for future networks. Dr. Ghosh is a recipient of the 2016 IEEE Stephen O. Rice Prize and the 2017 Neal Shepherd Prize, serves as a Senior Editor of IEEE Access, and was recently selected as an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2026–2027

Douglas Castor is Vice President and Head of Wireless Research at InterDigital, where he leads the incubation and development of emerging technologies for wireless systems. He has more than 25 years of experience in the wireless industry, spanning technology strategy, product development, and research innovation across 3G through 6G mobile systems and Wi-Fi technologies.

Key focus areas under Doug’s leadership include AI-Native approaches for 6G RAN and services, performance enhancements through extreme MIMO and advanced coding techniques, the enablement of near-zero-power cellular modems, increased flexibility in quality-of-service architectures, and the integration of communication and computing systems.

Doug is an industry leader and holds elected positions as Co-Chair of the Next G Alliance Steering Committee and Vice-Chair of its Technology Roadmap Working Group. He is also a founder and leader of the 6G World 6G Symposium.

He holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Gerhard P. Fettweis, is also founding Scientific Director of the Barkhausen Institute. In 1990 he earned his Ph.D. under H. Meyr at RWTH Aachen. Thereafter he was postdoc at IBM Research, San Jose, and then joined TCSI, Berkeley, USA. He researches wireless communications and chip design, coordinates 5G++Lab Germany and the German Cluster-for-Future SEMECO. His team spun-out 20 startups.

Gerhard is member of the US National Academy of Engineering the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), the German Academy of Engineering (Acatech), and Fellow of: IEEE, VDE/ITG, NAI, EURASIP, ITG, WWRF, and DATE. His most recent recognition is receiving the Bavarian Pioneer Award 2025.

Joe Madden founded Mobile Experts and has gradually become the industry’s most respected analyst.  Over the past 30 years, Mr. Madden accurately predicted Digital Predistortion, Remote Radio Heads, Small Cells, and 5G Fixed Wireless.   He accurately forecasted the failure of femtocells and the slow growth of IoT, vRAN, and Open RAN.  

Joe is currently investigating the collision of AI with the mobile telecom market and he’s making new predictions about the likely outcome.    Education: UCLA/Physics and Stanford/Business. He says that, despite years on the business side of Silicon Valley, he still obeys the laws of physics.

Kaniz Mahdi is Director of Technology at AWS Industries, where she shapes the organization’s strategy for 6G and Network AI, guiding how cloud and AI will redefine next‑generation communications. A recognized innovator across VoLTE, 5G, and Edge, she now influences AWS Industries’ vision for AI‑Native, cloud‑first network architectures.

She is the founder of the Open Grid Alliance, a contributor to major industry initiatives including the ATIS NextG Alliance and NSF RINGS, and a former member of the FCC Technology Advisory Council. Mahdi holds more than 45 patents and has been recognized among the 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology.

Her focus is on advancing the next generation of intelligence foundations that create new value for industries and position AWS as a leader in the evolution toward 6G.

Dr. Magnus Frodigh is Vice President and Head of Ericsson Research. In this role, he leads Ericsson’s long-term technology research organization, its close collaboration with academia and industry, and its contributions to the Ericsson business and product development.

He holds a Master of Science degree from Linköping University of Technology, Sweden, and a Ph.D. in Radio Communication Systems from the Royal Institute of Technology, where he is also adjunct Professor in Wireless Infrastructures. He is a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA). 

Frodigh joined Ericsson in 1994 and has over the past three decades held various key senior positions within Research & Development and Product Management, throughout the generations of mobile technology, from 2G all the way to current research on 6G technologies. He holds 29 patents.

Dr. Humphreys specializes in the application of optimal detection and estimation techniques to problems in satellite navigation, autonomous systems, and signal processing. He directs the Radionavigation Laboratory and is associate director of UT SAVES. His recent focus has been on assured perception for autonomous systems, including navigation, timing, and collision avoidance, and on centimeter-accurate location for the mass market.

Dr. Humphreys is also on the graduate study committee of the UT Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a faculty member of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG). He received the UT Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award in 2012, the NSF Career Award in 2015, the Institute of Navigation Thurlow Award in 2015, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, via National Science Foundation) in 2019. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Navigation and of the Royal Institute of Navigation. Dr. Humphreys joined the faculty of the Cockrell School of Engineering in Fall 2009.

Sorour Falahati is a Principal Researcher at Ericsson, specializing in physical-layer protocols and procedures within 3GPP Radio Access Network (RAN) standardization, the technical cornerstone of modern wireless communications. In August 2025, she began serving as Vice Chair of 3GPP RAN Working Group 1 (RAN1).

She has represented Ericsson in RAN1 since 2014, leading Ericsson RAN1 delegation as Vice Technical Coordinator and Technical Coordinator from 2018 to 2025. Before joining Ericsson Research in 2005, Sorour was a Senior Researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden.

She earned her B.Sc. from Sharif University of Technology (formerly Aryamehr), Tehran, Iran in 1994, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Digital and Wireless Communications from Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden in 1997 and 2002, respectively.

In recognition of her contributions to innovation, Sorour received Ericsson’s Inventor of the Year award in 2021.

Kaushik Chowdhury holds the Chandra Family Endowed Distinguished Professorship in Electrical and Computer Engineering #2 in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his BEng from the VJTI Mumbai, MS from the University of Cincinnati, and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining UT Austin, he spent fifteen years as a professor at Northeastern University, Boston. His research interests center on systems aspects of applied machine learning for wireless, multimodal sensor fusion, networked robotics, spectrum sensing and sharing, and open radio access networks. Prof. Chowdhury has worked on several large-scale wireless community infrastructure projects that include the Colosseum RF/network emulator as well as the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research project office, a joint $100 million public-private partnership between the NSF and wireless industry consortium to create city-scale testing platforms. He is a member of the NSF AI Institute for Future Edge Networks and Distributed Intelligence, led by The Ohio State University.

Prof. Chowdhury was a finalist for the 2023 US Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. He was also the winner of the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2017, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award in 2017, the Office of Naval Research Director of Research Early Career Award in 2016, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2015. He is the recipient of best paper awards at IEEE GLOBECOM'19, DySPAN'19, INFOCOM'17, ICC'13,'12,'09, and ICNC'13.

Jeffrey Andrews is the Truchard Family Endowed Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin where is Director of 6G@UT. He received the B.S. in Engineering with High Distinction from Harvey Mudd College, and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Dr. Andrews is an IEEE Fellow and ISI Highly Cited Researcher and has been co-recipient of 15 best paper awards as well as the 2015 Terman Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the 2021 Gordon Lepley Memorial Teaching Award, the 2021 IEEE ComSoc Joe LoCicero Service Award, the IEEE ComSoc Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award, and the 2019 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu technical field award. His former students include five IEEE Fellows, 12 professors at top universities in the USA, Asia, and Europe, and industry leaders on LTE and 5G systems, on which they collectively hold over one thousand US patents.