Keynote Speech by: Dr. K. K. Ramakrishnan
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, AT&T Labs Research

Dr. K. K. Ramakrishnan is a DMTS at AT&T Labs Research in Florham Park, New Jersey. He joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1994 and has been with AT&T Labs Research since its inception in 1996. Between 2000 and 2002, he was at TeraOptic Networks, Inc., as Founder and Vice President. Prior to 1994, he was a Technical Director and Consulting Engineer in Networking at Digital Equipment Corporation. At AT&T Labs Research, he has been involved in several technical and strategic activities in networking and information distribution, including Quality of Service, Congestion Control, Virtual Private Networks, IP Telephony, Metro Area Networks and Multimedia network design.

He has published over 100 papers and has over 80 patents issued. His contributions on congestion control, channel access protocols (for Ethernet and Cable), network interfaces, operating system support for network I/O, signaling and IP Telephony have been adopted and implemented in the industry. KK's current work is on a range of topics spanning from overlay networks and multimedia distribution to transport and link layer protocols that are designed to be robust against failures and losses. KK is an IEEE Fellow. He became an AT&T Fellow in 2006, recognized for "fundamental contributions to communications networks with lasting impact on AT&T and the industry, including congestion control, traffic management and VPN services". His work on the DECbit congestion avoidance mechanism was recognized in the 1995 retrospective issue of ACM Sigcomm Computer Communication Review as one of the 16 most important papers published over the previous 25 years in ACM Sigcomm publications. The work once again recently received the ACM Sigcomm Test of Time Paper Award in 2006.

K.K. has an MS degree from the Indian Institute of Science (1978), and an MS (1981) and Ph.D. (1983) in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park. K.K. has been on the editorial board of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and IEEE Network Magazine and has been a member of the National Research Council Panel on Information Technology for NIST. He is the General Chair and Technical Program Chair of several recent workshops and conferences on communications and protocols. He has participated in numerous standards bodies working on communication networks.