Summer Conference 2017

Phil McKinney is President and CEO of CableLabs. In this capacity he heads the research and development organization responsible for charting the cable industry’s technology and innovation roadmap.

Prior to joining CableLabs, he was the vice president and chief technology officer of the $40 billion (FY12) Personal Systems Group at HP. He was responsible for long-range strategic planning, research and development (R&D) and product roadmaps for the company’s PC product lines, including mobile devices, notebooks, desktops and workstations. In addition, Phil was founder and leader of HP’s Innovation Program Office (IPO). The IPO was chartered to identify, incubate and launch adjacent and fundamentally new technologies, products and services that would become the future growth engines for HP.

Recently (February 2012), Phil released his first book on innovation and personal creativity titled Beyond The Obvious, published by Hyperion. The book is available in hardcover, digital and audio formats. The book will soon be available in Russian, Chinese, Portuguese (Brazil), Korean and Japanese.

His influence on innovation and creativity includes:

• Sharing his expertise in innovation and creativity, free of charge (in an approach he refers to as “paying it forward”) through his award winning podcast Killer Innovations™ (available on iTunes). It has been named by CIO Insight as a “must listen” podcast.
• Vanity Fair named him the “The Innovation Guru”
• MSNBC and FOX Business both call him “The Gadget Guy”
• His uncanny ability to predict what’s coming next caused him to be dubbed as the “chief seer” by The San Jose Mercury News.
• He was named as one of the “25 Most Influential People in Mobile Tech” by LAPTOP Magazine.
• He is a contributing columnist for Forbes where he writes the column “The Objective” for Forbes.com

Phil serves on the:

• Advisory Board for Hacking Autism
• Board of Directors for The Computer History Museum
• Executive Board of the Santa Clara County Council for the Boy Scouts of America

Seventeen years of on-camera experience on national television and online. I helped to revolutionize the world of online video journalism as a pioneer of digital video content post dot.com boom and beyond. Through dedicated hard work and giving back to the communities in which I’ve reported on, I was also awarded the Governor’s medallion for extraordinary service to the broadcast industry. My career has given me journalistic breadth ranging from local news to meteorology, sports and business with a focus on tech.

My tenure at Forbes solidified my beat in business and has developed me into an extremely well connected industry expert. My passion and expertise for the tech world has poised me for my most recent endeavors as an Executive Consultant to established industry leaders, Advisor for Startups, On-air Career/ Technology Expert, Director of the Extreme Tech Challenge extremetechchallenge.com and Entrepreneur as Founder/Chairman of Kymerview.
Highlights of my broadcasting career:

• I shook up the industry by helping to build five video departments for large influential publications that shaped the online video journalism industry.
• Journalist at Forbes Magazine, interviewing the who’s who in tech, Hollywood, Capitol Hill, and sports: Facebook’s Sean Parker and Sir Richard Branson to Jay Leno and Jerry Rice.
• Fox News Channel contributor Saturday mornings on “Forbes On Fox”.
• First web-centric finance/tech focused female video reporter at forefront of emergence of online entertainment.
• First online video reporter accepted into Capital Press Corp in Sacramento.
• First Female Sports Director/Anchor/Reporter in San Francisco Bay Area
• First woman in SF Bay Area to host a racing show covering Nascar, IndyCar, and AMA Superbike
• First online technology video reporter at a traditional publication to receive an Emmy in NATAS, Northern California Chapter

Hilary Mason is CEO and Founder of Fast Forward Labs, an independent data technology research lab. She is also Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm. From 2009 to 2013, she served as Chief Scientist for bitly, the popular link-shortening service, where she continues to work as Scientist Emeritus, advising a team that studies attention on the internet in realtime.

A genuinely charming speaker who resonates with both tech and nonspecialist audiences, Hilary speaks about the challenges and the rewards of working with big data, with a special focus on machine learning.

Her work at Fast Forward Labs, which synthesizes the latest breakthroughs in big data from a wide range of fields, give her a uniquely broad understanding of the field. As Hilary explains, the most exciting breakthroughs in data right now are fragmented across a wide range of isolated communities. Hackers don’t talk to academic researchers. But Hilary and her team at Fast Forward unify these disparate forms of research — so if you’ve heard of some new development and want to know how to put it into effect, no one can help you more than Hilary.

Hilary is the co-founder of HackNY, a non-profit that helps talented engineering students find their way into the startup community of creative technologists in New York City; co-host of DataGotham, an annual event for professionals involved in data science; and member of NYCResistor. She advises a number of companies, including Mortar, knod.es, collective[i], DataKind, Betaspring, and TechStars New York. She also served on Mayor Bloomberg’s Technology and Innovation Advisory Council.

Hilary is on Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013 and 1000 Most Creative People in Business 2014. Other honors include the TechFellows Engineering Leadership award, the Fortune 40 under 40 Ones to Watch list and the Crain’s New York Business 40 under Forty.

Noah Scalin is the first artist-in-residence at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Business. He is creator of the Webby Award winning project Skull-A-Day and the collaborative science fiction universe & performance art project League of Space Pirates. His fine art has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Mütter Museum and Krause Gallery in NYC. His work has been featured in dozens of publications including Fast Company, Hi-Fructose, Juxtapos, Beautiful/Decay, USA Today, The Telegraph, and the New York Times. Noah co-runs Another Limited Rebellion an art & innovation consulting firm and is a sought after public speaker on creativity. He is the author of six books, including most recently Creative Sprint – which he co-wrote with his sister/business partner Mica Scalin.

Raymond L. Gifford counsels communications, electric and gas utilities, and information technology companies on state and federal aspects of regulation, administrative law, and competition policy. He is an expert in public utilities law, and the law and economics of regulation of network industries. Mr. Gifford’s law and policy work focuses on the convergence of broadband communications and energy, as well as environmental policy as it applies to the electric industry. He represents clients in state and federal courts and agencies, and serves as an expert witness on utility regulation and its history. He is also a Executive Fellow at the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology and Entrepreneurship, and Co-Directs the Institute for Regulatory Law & Economics at University of Colorado Law School.

Mr. Gifford served as Chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission from 1999-2003. Following that, he served as President of The Progress & Freedom Foundation, a Washington DC-based think-tank that studied the digital revolution as it relates to regulation of network industries. He entered the regulatory law world as First Assistant Attorney General in the Colorado Attorney General’s Office. He clerked for the Honorable Richard P. Matsch of the United States District Court for the District of Colorado. Mr. Gifford has authored a number of articles on communications law, public utility regulation and competition policy in network industries. He is a graduate of University of Chicago Law School and St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute

Scott Yates is part of the first class of Innovators In Residence at CableLabs. He is the founder and former CEO of BlogMutt, a blog writing service, his third startup. He previously brought to market a legislative tracking service now known as BillTrack50, and before that a traffic information service for which he was awarded a patent. That company is now part of Microsoft. He has a journalism degree from New York University and lives in Denver with his wife, son, dog, and dictionary collection, and in his spare time is trying to fix Daylight Saving Time.

Jules sets the strategic direction and vision for the company, and is the chief architect of OTOY’s technology roadmap. Prior to OTOY, Jules created the web’s first 3D video game platform and licensed the software to Macromedia, Disney, Warner Brothers, Nickelodeon, Microsoft, Hasbro and AT&T. Hailed by technology writer George Gilder as “the most inventive software engineer he has ever met,” Jules has been featured in numerous publications including Forbes, CNN Money, and All Things Digital.

Kathy Zachem serves as Executive Vice President, Regulatory and State Legislative Affairs for Comcast Corporation.  In this capacity, she is responsible for the Company’s advocacy before federal agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission, and state regulatory and legislative bodies.

Ms. Zachem joined Comcast in 2008 from the law firm Wilkinson Barker Knauer, LLP, where she was a founding partner and practiced communications law for 23 years.  During that time, she represented clients from nearly every segment of the communications sector including media, telecom, wireless, satellite, and internet service providers.

Ms. Zachem was named among the “Most Powerful Women in Cable” and is regularly named to “The CableFAX Top 100” list by CableFAX magazine.  In 2016, she was the recipient of the NCTA–The Internet & Television Association’s prestigious Vanguard Award for Government and Community Relations. She was honored by Multichannel News as a 2014 Wonder Woman and by Legal Momentum as a 2012 Aiming High awardee. Washingtonian recognized her as one of “Washington’s Best” lawyers, and Chambers USA listed her as one of the leading lawyers in the telecom, broadcast and satellite fields.  Ms. Zachem is an active member of the Federal Communications Bar Association, and has served several terms on its Executive Committee and Foundation Board, and is a recipient of the Association’s Distinguished Service Award. She also serves as a board member of the Washington Tennis & Educational Foundation.

Ms. Zachem received her JD from the George Mason University School of Law and a joint BA in economics and political science from The George Washington University.  She is admitted to practice law in Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Nick DiPonzio is Vice President, Outside Plant, in the HFC Network Maintenance & Construction Department of Cox Communications. He leads the outside plant and critical infrastructure teams with more than 1,700 people, over 100,000 miles of network infrastructure and 200 technical facilities. Nick’s primary focus is developing reliable, simple, and cost-effective solutions that meet customer expectations and business demands – delivering on Cox’s vision to be the most trusted provider of communication and entertainment services in America.

During his more than 16 years in the cable industry, Nick has served in various leadership roles across functional groups in the organization from field services and technology to commercial business sales.

Nick began his telecommunications career as a Field Operations Supervisor for Time Warner Cable in 1995, after receiving a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from University of Buffalo, and soon took on a larger responsibility as Upgrade Manager to Construction. In 2000, Nick transitioned to a role as Engineering Manager for RCN Telecom. In this position he led the engineering build out for voice, video and data service over an HFC network across the five-county Philadelphia area.

Nick’s Cox Communications journey began in 2001 when he accepted a position as Vice President of Network Engineering & Support in Wichita, Kansas, where he led the Kansas & Arkansas operations and coordinated planning and engineering for the launch of Circuit Switched and VoIP Telephony Service. In 2008, Nick became Vice President of Cox Business in Wichita. He took on P&L Management of a commercial business unit delivering 30% revenue growth and 32% FCF growth. Nick quickly progressed to Executive Director of Technology – Eastern Division, where he provided leadership and support to the field technology and technical operations teams in the optimization of resources and service-delivery technologies to achieve business objectives. After that, Nick became Executive Director of RF and Facilities Engineering, where he was responsible for the capital planning of distribution and technical facilities.

Nick stepped into his current role as Vice President of Outside Plant and Critical Infrastructure in 2013. In this role, Nick provides strategic leadership and engineering discipline to architectural solutions, company specifications and standards and operational practices and processes to meet business demands. He was instrumental in the completion of the Brownfield Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) PON build for 70K Homes passed within 12 months. He is also responsible for the concept design to deliver solutions using the micro OLT, which enabled a scalable, cost-effective GPON platform, and developed and operationally integrated HFC Performance metrics.

Phil Weiser is the Hatfield Professor of Law and Telecommunications, and Executive Director and Founder of the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado. From June 2011-July 2016, Professor Weiser served as Dean after re-joining the Colorado faculty in June, 2011. From April 2010-June 2011, he served as the Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation to the National Economic Council Director at the White House. From July 2009-April 2010, he served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the United States Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.

Since first joining the CU faculty in 1999, Professor Weiser has worked to establish a national center of excellence in telecommunications and technology law, founding the Journal on Telecommunications & High Technology Law and the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship as well as writing and teaching in the areas of competition policy, innovation policy, and Internet policy.  Over the last several years, Weiser has co-authored three books (Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age (MIT Press 2013) (with Jon Nuechterlein), Telecommunications Law and Policy (Carolina Academic Press 2012) (With Stuart Benjamin, Howard Shelanski  & James Speta), and The Jury and Democracy:  How Jury Deliberation Promotes Civic Engagement and Political Participation  (Oxford University Press 2010), written numerous articles (in both law journals and publications such as the Washington Post and Foreign Affairs), and testified before both houses of Congress.  He also remained engaged in public service, arguing a number of pro bono cases before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, co-chairing the Colorado Innovation Council, and serving as the lead agency reviewer for the Federal Trade Commission as part of the 2008 Presidential Transition.

Prior to joining the Colorado Law faculty, Professor Weiser served as senior counsel to the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division at the United States Department of Justice, advising him primarily on telecommunications matters.  Before his appointment at the Justice Department, Weiser served as a law clerk to Justices Byron R. White and Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the United States Supreme Court and to Judge David Ebel at the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.  Weiser graduated with high honors from both the New York University School of Law and Swarthmore College.

Bob Iannucci leads the CyLab Mobility Research Center and is known for leading both software and systems research in scalable and mobile computing. Previously, he served as Chief Technology Officer of Nokia and Head of Nokia Research Center (NRC). Bob spearheaded the effort to transform NRC into an Open Innovation center, creating “lablets” at MIT, Stanford, Tshinghua University, the University of Cambridge, and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Under his leadership, NRC’s previously established labs and the new lablets delivered fundamental contributions to the worldwide Long Term Evolution for 3G (LTE) standard; created and promulgated what is now the MIPI UniPro interface for high-speed, in-phone interconnectivity; created and commercialized Bluetooth Low Energy – extending wireless connectivity to coin-cell-powered sensors and other devices; and delivered new technology initiatives including TrafficWorks (using mobile phones to crowd source traffic patterns), part of the Mobile Millennium Project, Point and Find (Augmented Reality using the mobile phone’s camera for image recognition and “zero click” search — identified by MIT Technology Review as one of the TR10 Breakthrough Technologies), and the Morph Concept (opening new directions for using nanotechnology to significantly improve mobile phone functionality and usability).

Bob has led engineering teams at startup companies focused on virtualized networking and computational fluid dynamics, creating systems that offered order-of-magnitude improvements over alternatives. He also served as Director of Digital Equipment Corporation’s Cambridge Research Laboratory (CRL) and became VP of Research for Compaq. CRL created some of the earliest multimedia indexing technologies, and these became part of Alta Vista. In addition, the CRL team together with Dan Siewiorek, Asim Smailagic and others at CMU created MoCCA — a mobile communication and computing architecture — that prefigured and anticipated (by more than a decade) much of what has become today’s smartphone technology. MoCCA won the IDEA Gold award for its innovative approach to facilitating real-time interaction within teams. The industrial design prototype is now part of the permanent design collection at the Smithsonian Institution. Bob was a founder of Exa Corporation, and led the engineering team that created and delivered Digital Physics (a term he coined and that Exa holds as a registered trademark) fluid flow simulation CAD tools. Exa went public in 2012. Bob spent the earliest days of his career at IBM studying and developing scalable computing systems and was one of the designers of the highly successful IBM 4341 and 4381 processors.

Bob remains active as a hands-on systems builder. His most recent iPhone app for radio direction finding is in use in over 70 countries, and he is actively engaged in building WiFi-based “internet of things” devices and the cloud services behind them. He serves as an advisor to companies developing new technologies for ultra-low-power computing, mobile video systems, and cloud-connected mobile apps.

Bob earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 1988, and his dissertation was on the hybridization of dataflow and traditional von Neumann architectures, offering advantages over both. He has served on a number of scientific and engineering advisory boards and was on the program committees for the 3rd and 4th International Symposia on Wearable Computing. Bob also served as a member of the selection committee for the Millennium Technology Prize in 2008.

Kar-Han Tan is Vice President of Engineering at NovuMind, where he leads the development of full-stack artificial intelligence technologies and solutions. Previously he led the HP computer vision team that built and launched the Sprout, the first PC with advanced vision and mixed reality capabilities. Sprout features include object segmentation, 3D scanning, and real-time collaboration capabilities that leverage Kar-Han’s work on gaze-aware immersive communication at HP Labs.

Earlier, he was manager of the algorithms group at Epson R&D, where he led the invention of advanced projection and imaging technologies. Kar-Han earned his M.S. from UCLA and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Roger Greene is a business lead at Facebook where he is responsible for developing more efficient and scalable networks. Roger collaborates with network operators, technology companies, and governments to drive innovation and adoption of new technology, business models, processes and policies to build new infrastructure and connect the world.

Roger has spent the last twenty years in technology and telecommunications. Prior to Facebook, he held a range of leadership roles in product management and marketing at Level 3 Communications and different Internet startups. Roger earned his MBA from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and his Bachelor’s from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

As a technology and product pioneer Bernardo has played a key role, both as a thought leader and as a creator of highly innovative and pioneering business solutions in the information technology industry. Working with and managing exceptionally talented and energetic technology teams on a global scale, he has implemented the first market-based resource allocation systems for computer networks; exploited the emergence of the world-wide web to pioneer the use of large scale data to identify communities inside organizations; and, most dramatically, to quantitatively predict the technology future. For example, Bernardo correctly predicted that 80% of enterprise infrastructure would be on cloud by 2020 way back in 2010, when cloud was in its nascence. In addition, he was the inventor of ePrint, the first system that allows any mobile device to remotely print any document anywhere in the world at the press of a button, just as smart phones were taking-off, which alone provided millions in weekly new revenues to HP.

Starting his career at the legendary Xerox PARC, he quickly became a lab manager and later a Xerox Fellow by creating a constant stream of innovations that went far beyond the confines of Xerox. To mention one of many, he pioneered the use of email exchanges to create Beehive, a system that was the first to automatically identify communities of practice within organizations. That system was used to facilitate and augment teamwork throughout PARC. Within a year he went on to deploy Spawn, the first market-based systems for allocating resources within computer networks and a thermal market for controlling the temperature at Xerox PARC, which was later licensed to Honeywell. Both of these inventions were widely covered by media like the New York Times and other technology forums.

With the advent of the Web 2.0, and his becoming both a Senior Fellow at HP and a Director of Social Computing at HP Labs, Bernardo realized that the unstructured information contained within the web could be harvested in the service of innovative new tools. A most dramatic example was the development of a technology based on machine learning that used Twitter postings about movies and products to predict the precise amount of money and demand that they would gather. This technology was featured extensively by the media and used by a number of HP customers. This was followed by a number of innovations, such as the creation of HP-wide Watercooler, the first enterprise social network.

Yet another facet of Bernardo’s leadership was his engagement with all HP divisions, acting both as advisor and co-creator on a number of market-ready projects. The impact of his pioneering contributions at HP can be measured in billions in revenues in myriad areas of HP’s business. At the same time, he has been an active participant and advisor in a number of important global technology and policy forums, such as the Aspen Festival of Ideas, Ted-X, the Council of Nordic Ministers, and the European Commission. As such, he has given numerous highly visible presentations, not only to Xerox and HP customers, but also to high-level policy-makers in the US and UK governments, as well as the European Commission. He is also involved in issues of privacy and trust both in IoT and in the Web, creating and evangelizing a number of novel solutions.

Bernardo’s most recent 15 years as Senior Fellow, SVP, and Director at HP and then at HPE, responsible for strategic directions, the creation of new technologies, and interactions with both internal divisions and outside customers speak to his leadership in both pioneering technology solutions and how they move a business in a market-leadership role.

Throughout his career he has generated more than 46 patents (with more pending) and is recognized as both a thought leader and effective manager of creative teams. Bernardo has a Ph.D. in Physics from University of Pennsylvania and lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Balan Nair is Executive Vice President and Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for Liberty Global. In this capacity he is responsible for overseeing Liberty Global’s worldwide network, Technology and Innovation operations, including Product Development, IT, Network Operations, Mobile Operations and Global Supply Chain functions. He also leads our Technology Investment Venture group and our Corporate Strategy Group. To support Liberty Global’s customer-centric focus, Mr. Nair is instrumental in working with our senior management and board to leverage our innovation and technology operating model on a global basis. Mr. Nair is an executive officer of Liberty Global and sits on Liberty Global’s Executive Leadership Team and the Investment Committee.

Prior to joining Liberty Global in July of 2007, Mr. Nair served as AOL’s chief technology officer overseeing Technology, IT, and network operations. Prior to his role at AOL, Mr. Nair spent 12 years at Qwest Communications International Inc. (Qwest), most recently as Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Technology Officer. He has a long history of working in the telco industry, the web world and now the cable and media industry.

Mr. Nair sits on the boards of Charter Communications, a leading cable operator in the United States, and Adtran Corporation. In addition, he is a co-chair of Energy 2020, an initiative of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers to reduce the cable industry’s power consumption. He holds a patent in systems development and is a Licensed Professional Engineer in Colorado. Mr. Nair holds a Masters of Business Administration and a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering, both from Iowa State University.

Dr. Jennifer Andreoli-Fang is a Distinguished Technologist in the OCTO and R&D group at CableLabs in Boulder, Colorado. Jennifer joined CableLabs in 2007, and has led the development of several key technologies for the cable industry. She is currently leading the innovations on fixed mobile convergence, unlicensed LTE, as well as the multi-vendor team for the development of full duplex DOCSIS MAC and upper layers. She led the development of DOCSIS 3.1 MAC specification, and the evolution of the DOCSIS 3.0 MAC.

Jennifer is actively involved in research and development of both fixed and mobile broadband communication systems. She has 48 patents issued or pending. Prior to joining CableLabs, she held positions in the wireless and satellite industry.

Jennifer received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, San Diego in 2005, and the Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1998.

Intrigued by early cell phones in the 1980s, Farooq Khan decided to turn his curiosity for “what makes them tick” into his career. And ever since, he has never doubted he made the right choice. Now, after three decades, Farooq is the leading authority on mobile technology and envisions a world where an Internet of connected people and things will make us more aware of humanity as a whole, creating a shared wisdom to solve the world’s greatest challenges.

Farooq Khan is currently CEO of PHAZR, a 5G Millimeter wave radio network solutions provider. Previously, he was the President and Head of Samsung Research America, Samsung’s US-based R&D unit, where he led high impact collaborative research programs in mobile technology. He holds over 200 U.S. patents, has written 50 research articles and a best-selling book, and presented over 100 speeches at professional forums worldwide.

In his current role, Vik Saxena is responsible for driving the MSO products roadmap at Nokia for the global cable and media market. He works closely with cable MSOs to define and develop Nokia’s cable products and solutions roadmap. He is also responsible for leading strategic engagements with partners to drive the MSO business.

Vik has over 15 years of leadership experience driving innovation at both services and solutions providers such as Comcast, Nielsen, and Nokia. He has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, an MBA from the Wharton School, and holds 12 patents.