Our TFS People

Ricard Vilalta

SDG TFS Chair // CTTC

Ricard Vilalta is Research Director in the Optical Networks and Systems Department at CTTC. He is Chair of ETSI TeraFlowSDN and an active contributor in several standardization bodies such as ONF (OTCC), ETSI (NFV, ZSM), and IETF (CCAMP, TEAS). He is a member of the technical steering team of Open Transport Configuration & Control in ONF. He is leading open source contributions and features in ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM) with special focus on 5G technologies. He has been involved in several international, EU, national and industrial research projects. He was Project Coordinator of 5GPPP TeraFlow projects and led 5GTANGO impact activities (WP leader), INSPIRE‐5Gplus experimental activities (WP leader), and participated in several 5GPPP Working Groups.

Håkon Lønsethagen

SDG TFS Vice-Chair // Telenor

Håkon is a Senior Research Scientist at Telenor Research, where he has been working with telecom network and service management, orchestration and control, including systems integration and distributed systems frameworks. Over the last years his activities have addressed inter-provider network services and business models, Internet evolution, lately including SDN, NFV and 5G ecosystems. This includes curiosity to discover and analyse dependencies between technical architecture, business architecture and multi-provider ecosystem platforms. He has participated in several EU projects, often in leading positions, and he is currently engaged with the European 5G PPP and SNS JU, and member of the 6G Smart Networks and Services Industry Association (6G-IA) Governing Board and the NetworldEurope Steering Board.

SDG Vice-Chair // Telefónica

Lluis Miguel has been working at Telefonica since August 2011, where he focuses on scalable networks and their interaction with cloud and distributed service. Previously, he joined the network planning department of Orange Spain in 2006. He began his career in 1997 at Alcatel Spain, holding several positions in R&D standardization, product development, and customer engineering. In parallel, between 2002 and 2010, he served as an adjunct lecturer at the Telematics Department of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He holds a Ph.D. in Telematics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (2021), an M.Sc. in Telematics jointly from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (2010), and an M.Sc. in Telecommunications from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (1997). He is an active contributor to several standardization bodies, including ETSI, IETF, and O-RAN.

Lluís Gifre

TSC Chair // CTTC

Lluís is a researcher in the Packet-Optical Networks and Services (PONS) research unit, part of the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC). He is the current chair of the TSC of ETSI TeraFlowSDN and an IEEE Senior Member. He participated in 9 EC/nationally-funded projects and 1 industrial collaboration. He is the lead inventor of 1 patent, and he has co-authored more than 60 publications in peer-reviewed and indexed journals and recognized international conferences. His research interests include cloud-based platforms in support of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), network slicing, and orchestration of 5G/6G infrastructures.

Georgios P. Katsikas

TSC Member // UBITECH

Georgios Katsikas is a Technical Manager at UBITECH's Network Softwarization and IoT (NSIT) group, focusing on programmable cloud-native networked systems. His main interests span across Computer Networks and Operating Systems with a focus on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). In his doctoral thesis, Georgios introduced how to realize software-based NFV service chains at the emerging and utterly challenging link speeds at 100 Gbps using commodity hardware, while obliterating latency. His latest research is published at top systems conferences (NSDI, CoNEXT) and journals (ACM TOCS) and featured in the ACM Technews, PHYS.ORG, ECN, KTH, and APNIC. Georgios has been actively contributing to cutting edge networking frameworks, such as DPDK, ONOS, and the Click modular router, while also actively impacting relevant ETSI software development groups, such as ETSI TFS and ETSI OSL.

Pablo Armingol Robles

TSC Member // Telefonica

Pablo has been with Telefónica since 2022, where he serves as the SDN Expert within the CDO - IP Networks and Protocols department. Specialized in SDN deployments and multilayer network slicing for transport networks, he has co-authored multiple papers in leading industry journals (including JOCN and IEEE) focusing on AI-driven automation. Additionally, he actively participates in both national and European research projects. Pablo holds a degree in Telematics Engineering and a Master's in Cybersecurity from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), where he is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Department of Telematics Engineering.

Carlos Natalino da Silva

TSC Member // Chalmers University of Technology

Carlos Natalino is a Researcher with the Optical Networks Unit, Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology. His main interests are on the area of machine-learning-assisted network automation and programmability, and control plane scalability. He has contributed to several national (Swedish) and international (European) projects. He is currently the technical leader of the integration and validation work package of TeraFlow H2020. Carlos is an educator with more than 7 years of experience in teaching programming and networking courses to undergraduate programs. He received a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Pará, Brazil, in 2016. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers, 4 of which are proof-of-concept demonstrators.