Communication networks beyond the capacity crunch - further discussion

Andrew D. Ellis was born in Underwood, U.K., in 1965. He received the B.Sc. degree in physics with a minor in mathematics from the University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K., in 1987. He received the Ph.D. degree in electronic and electrical engineering from The University of Aston in Birmingham, Birmingham, U.K., in 1997 for his study on all optical networking beyond 10 Gbit/s.

He previously worked for British Telecom Research Laboratories as a Senior Research Engineer investigating the use of optical amplifiers and advanced modulation formats in optical networks and the Corning Research Centre as a Senior Research Fellow where he led activities in optical component characterization. He headed the Transmission and Sensors Group at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland, where he was also a member of the Department of Physics, University College Cork. He research interests include the evolution of core and metro networks, and the application of photonics to sensing. He is now Professor of Optical Communications at Aston University where he is also deputy director of the Institute of Photonics Technologies (AIPT) group. He has published over 170 journal papers and over 25 patents in the field of photonics, primarily targeted at increasing capacity, reach and functionality in the optical layer.

Prof. Ellis is a member of the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Engineering Technology, and is a Chartered Physicist. He an associate editor of the journal Optics Express.

David Saad is a Professor of Information Mathematics in Aston University, Birmingham UK. He received a BA in Physics and a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, Haifa, Israel (1982), an MSc in Physics (1987) and a PhD in Electrical Engineering (1993) from Tel-Aviv University. He joined the Physics Department at the University of Edinburgh in 1992 and Aston University in 1995. His research, published in over 170 journal and conference papers, focusses on the application of statistical physics methods to a range of fields, which include neural networks, error-correcting codes, multi-node communication, network optimisation, routing, noisy computation and advanced inference methods. He served as Head of Mathematics in Aston from 2006 to 2012. He is a Fellow of The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and an editorial board member of Scientific Reports.

Professor Sir David Neil Payne CBE FRS FREng is Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton, UK. His work has had a great impact on telecommunications and laser technology over the last forty years. The vast transmission capacity of today's internet results directly from the erbium-doped fibre amplifier (EDFA) invented by David and his team in the 1980s. His pioneering work in fibre fabrication in the 70s resulted in almost all of the special fibres in use today including fibre lasers.

With US funding, he led the team that broke the kilowatt barrier for fibre laser output to international acclaim and now holds many other fibre laser performance records. He has published over 650 Conference and Journal papers.

As an entrepreneur, David's activities have led to a cluster of 11 photonics spin out companies in and around Southampton. He founded SPI Lasers PLC, which was acquired by the Trumpf Corporation of Germany. He is an Emeritus Chairman of the Marconi Society and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Engineering. David is a fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering.