Panel


Low-Earth Orbit Satellite Networks – Understanding the Opportunities and Challenges

Apurv Mehra

Apurv Mehra

Senior Product Manager, Emerging Markets, Microsoft

Apurv Mehra is currently a Senior Product Manager in the Emerging Market Group (EMG), Microsoft India. His current focus is to launch a new product which helps deliver content and digital services to the last mile underserved consumers in an assisted manner via neighbourhood 'Kirana' stores.
He was previously a Research Engineer in the Technology for Emerging Markets group (TEM) at Microsoft Research India. His research involved designing complex socio-technical systems to cater to the needs of users in emerging markets.
He is also the Co-Founder and CTO of Three Wheels United, a data-driven lending company which focuses on providing credit to purchase electric vehicles to low income users who are typically excluded for formal banking sector, thereby serving dual purpose of financial inclusion and reducing carbon emissions.


Kiruthika Devaraj

Kiruthika Devaraj

Sr. Director of Engineering, Planet Labs PBC

Dr. Kiruthika Devaraj is a Sr. Director of Engineering at Planet Labs PBC. She leads the spacecraft design groups to design and manufacture the avionics, power, and communications systems for Planet’s satellites. Planet builds and operates the world’s largest constellation of remote sensing satellites to image the Earth on a daily basis and make change visible, accessible, and actionable. A recent notable project includes the architecture and development of Planet’s high speed downlink radio and antenna that achieved 1.7 Gbps data throughput from a 3U form-factor CubeSat. Prior to Planet, Kiruthika was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Kavli Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University where she built microwave and millimeter-wave instruments to study star formation processes. One of the instruments she built, Argus a 16-pixel W-band focal plane array is commissioned at the Green Bank Telescope. She has a M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech, she worked on the NASA mission Juno, building a laboratory analog of Jupiter’s atmosphere and studying the microwave properties of gases in the Jovian atmosphere.



Venkatesha Prasad

Dr. RangaRao Venkatesha Prasad

Associate Professor, Faculty of Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, TU Delft

Dr. RangaRao is an associate professor at Embedded Software group of Delft University of Technology since 2013. His research interests are in the area of Tactile Internet, Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), Energy Harvesting and 60 GHz millimeter wave networks. He has participated in several European and Dutch national projects in the area of IoTs, 60 GHz communications, Smart-energy systems, Personal networks and Cognitive Radios.
He has served on the editorial board of many international journals and magazines including IEEE Transaction on Green Communication Networks, IEEE JSAC, IEEE Communication Magazine, IEEE Surveys and Tutorials and Elsevier-Communication Networks. He was nominated as the vice-chair of IEEE Tactile Internet standardization group. From 2005-12 he was a senior researcher and adjunct faculty at TU Delft working on the EU FP7 Magnet (and Beyond) Project and the Dutch project PNP-2008 on Personal Networks (PNs), Future Home Networks, etc.


Gint Atkinson

Gint Atkinson

VP, Network Strategy and Digital Architecture, SES

Gint Atkinson is the Vice President Network Strategy and Architecture at SES Networks, a provider of global managed data services. He leads the transformation for SES Networks’ 5G, virtualization, cloud, and network platform architectures that unify multiple satellite constellations and deliver 5G services from the edge to the cloud.
Prior to SES Networks, he served as the head of technology for Colt where he pioneered and launched the first large scale SDN, SD-WAN, and global Datacenter Interconnect services in 2012 offering on-demand elastic terabit services across 100 datacenters in Asia Pacific.
Mr. Atkinson has worked in the networking, mobile, and emerging media industries over 32 years as a serial entrepreneur and innovator for start-ups and large service providers including T-Mobile, NTT DOCOMO, AT&T, KDDI, Virgin Media and others, where he has led the development and first to market launch of industry changing technologies and services.


Deepak Vasisht

Deepak Vasisht

Assistant Professor, Computer Science, UIUC

Deepak Vasisht is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at UIUC. He works on wireless networks and Internet-of-Things. His current research focuses on next generation networking systems such as satellite networks, 5G, and in-body networks. He recently graduated with a Ph.D. from MIT, advised by Prof. Dina Katabi. He was also the inaugural Industry Research Fellow at Microsoft, where he worked on FarmBeats among other things.


Debopam Bhattacherjee

Debopam Bhattacherjee (HOST)

Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research – India

Debopam recently joined Microsoft Research - India as a Senior Researcher after receiving his PhD in computer networks from ETH Zurich. His research focuses on “new space” satellite networks, low latency terrestrial networks, and Internet architecture. His research work has received multiple awards in the past -- IRTF’s Applied Networking Research Prize 2020, a Best Paper Award at IMC 2020, and a best dataset award at PAM 2020. Debopam earned his masters degree from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He earned his bachelors degree in computer science from Jadavpur University.