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Open Networking Foundation Selects 12 Research Associates to Join Roster

Associates Offer Knowledge and Insight to Further the Software-Defined Networking Movement

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 8, 2013 – The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today announced the appointment of 12

Research Associates to the organization. ONF added nine industry thought leaders as associates to join three returning researchers for the coming year.

The Research Associates are identified by ONF as being especially active in the SDN space, to the degree that they should be helping ONF produce its products rather than just building on them. Individuals are selected based on significant contributions to the creation and advancement of SDN and the OpenFlow® standard, as well as a need to be involved within ONF to accomplish pertinent goals. Research Associates are given complete ONF participation privileges based on the merits of their past research, prominence in the field, and relevance to ONF's mission.

"ONF is focused on the successful commercialization of SDN and the OpenFlow® standard. We are not a research organization; however, our ties to the research community have always been important. As is the case with these Research Associates, our work is enriched and made more relevant by the deep skills and technical perspectives of these exceptional researchers," said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. "The knowledge of these researchers is instrumental to keeping ONF and its member companies at the forefront of the SDN movement. We strongly support the work of researchers in this space, and we value their commitment to the organization."

Research Associates are invited and appointed by ONF through a nomination process that involves member companies, self-nominations, and designations by the executive director. Appointments are for one year and are renewable. The appointments do not constitute membership in ONF for either the individual or their organization, but the first Research Associate in an organization is considered the equivalent of Principal Investigator for that organization. As such, she or he may sponsor a very small number of additional Research Associates from the same organization. Below is a list of the appointed Research Associates on ONF's roster, their professional affiliation, and a brief biography of each.

Dr. Ali Al-Shabibi
Al-Shabibi is a network software developer at the Open Networking Laboratory (ON.Lab). His research focus is on SDN theories and philosophy, and new networking applications.

Dr. Jun Bi
Bi is the professor and director of network architecture and IPv6 research division at the Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace (former Network Research Center) at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the leading expert (PI) of the first major SDN project supported by the "863" High-Tech Program (China Ministry of Science and Technology): Future Network architecture and Innovation Environment (FINE).

Uwe Dahlmann
Dahlmann is the lead test engineer at the Indiana Center for Network Translational Research and Education (InCNTRE) SDN Lab at Indiana University. For more than 10 years, he has been involved in design, implementation, and operation of large-scale networks in public and private sectors. Dahlmann's work experience has centered on security, networks, and their application.

Dr. Nick Feamster
Feamster is the first Darnell-Kanal Associate Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. His research spans computer networking and systems security, including network routing protocols, network operations, systems and network security, and anonymous communication systems. This will be his second year as an ONF Research Associate.

Dr. Umesh Krishnaswamy
Krishnaswamy is network architect at Open Networking Laboratory and leads the development of the Open Network Operating System (ONOS), an open-source distributed operating system for SDN. His interests are in the software infrastructure aspects of cloud computing, SDN, big data, and emerging technologies. He serves as principal investigator for ON.Lab in ONF.

Ron Milford
Milford is the manager of the InCNTRE SDN Lab at Indiana University where he leads interoperability testing of the OpenFlow® protocol both in the SDN Lab and at industry events. With more than 15 years of experience as a network engineer, Milford was instrumental in running the ONF Fall 2012 Plugfest hosted at the InCNTRE SDN Lab and the OpenFlow® SCinet Research Sandbox at SC11 in Seattle.

Dr. Indermohan Monga
Monga is chief technologist and area lead for network engineering, tools and research, energy sciences network (ESnet), and scientific networking division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He focuses on researching, innovating, and commercializing R&D initiatives across applications within the virtualization, programmable networking, cloud computing, data centers, and enterprise sensor middleware systems.

Dr. Guru Parulkar
Parulkar is consulting professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and executive director of the Open Networking Research Center (ONRC) at Stanford. He also serves as executive director of the Open Networking Laboratory and as chair of the Open Networking Summit (ONS) series. Prior to ONRC, Parulkar served as the executive director of the Clean Slate Internet Design Research Program at Stanford University, which gave birth to the OpenFlow® protocol. This will be Parulkar's second year as an ONF Research Associate and he serves as principal investigator for Stanford University.

Dr. Bernhard Plattner
Plattner is a professor of computer engineering at ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), where he leads the communication systems group. He is also a partner in the EU-funded research project OFELIA, which is creating a test bed for SDN and OpenFlow® protocol experiments. His research areas include the future of Internet architecture, Internet security and resilience, and wireless opportunistic networks.

Dr. Jennifer Rexford
Rexford is a professor of engineering and computer science at Princeton University. She previously spent eight and a half years at AT&T Research. Her research focuses on Internet routing, network measurement, and network management, with the larger goal of making data networks easier to design, understand, and manage. This will be her second year as an ONF Research Associate.

Dr. Christian Esteve Rothenberg
Rothenberg is senior research scientist at CPqD Research and Development Center in Telecommunications, Brazil. He focuses on the areas of IP systems and networking, devoting efforts to realize operational deployments of the OpenFlow® standard and identify value-added use cases of SDN in the Brazilian network technologies ecosystem.

Steven Wallace
Wallace leads SDN education and international collaboration initiatives as the executive director of the InCNTRE at Indiana University. He has more than 25 years of experience in network design, research, and deployment, including 10 years leading IU's engineering support for Abilene (Internet2's first high-speed backbone) and directing its Advanced Network Management Lab. He serves as principal investigator for Indiana University.

Full biographies for each associate and information about the ONF Research Associates program can be found at.

About ONF
Launched in 2011 by Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo!, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a growing nonprofit organization with more than 90 members whose mission is to advance the commercialization and use of SDN and the OpenFlow® standard. ONF will accelerate the delivery and use of SDN and OpenFlow® technologies and standards while fostering a vibrant market of products, services, applications, customers, and users. For further details visit the ONF website at: https://opennetworking.org.