Denan Kuni

Denan Kuni was born in Johannesburg, South Africa.  In 1990, he immigrated to Canada with his family.  While in Toronto, he successfully completed a Bachelor of Arts (B.A) degree in Political Science, specializing in International Politics, Law and Development with a focus on Africa. Mr. Kuni went on to pursue a Master of Arts (M.A) in Political Science and continued this specialization. Two years later, he was accepted into the Canadian Foreign Service as a Policy Advisor on African Affairs.  He managed Canada's bilateral relations with Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Namibia and Zambia.  After almost four years within the Canadian Foreign Service, Denan returned to his native South Africa. 

Upon his return to South Africa, he started a BEE SME in Johannesburg called Red Leaf Technologies where he served as Director of the E-Governance division. The company specialized in the creation and deployment of ICT and advertising portal services to provide unrestricted access to information and training services especially in rural or less developed areas in South Africa.

He then accepted a position as Deputy Director: Africa, at the Department of Trade and Industry (the dti) in Pretoria. Prior to leaving the Department, had attained the position of Director: Governance and Operations/Africa – Trade and Investment within the Office of the Deputy Director- General for Trade and Investment South Africa (TISA), a division of the dti.

In February 2009, Denan joined the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), where he currently holds the position of Senior Manager: Business Development. His key duties involve international business development for the Meraka Institute.

Sagar Gubbi

Sagar Gubbi works for the GSMA Development Fund and is currently based in their London office. The GSMA Development Fund identifies and implements new applications of mobile communications for people in the developing world living on less than $2 a day. Sagar currently works in the Development Fund's 'Green Power for Mobile' and 'Community Power' initiatives. His background is a combination of technology and social development. In the past, he has worked with Robert Bosch, a German Automotive Engineering company, in their Automotive Multimedia and Communications division in Germany. He has also worked with Unitus, a Seattle-based Microfinance investment and consulting organization, in their Bangalore office in India, on Microfinance and urban poor livelihoods initiatives. He has also worked on renewable energy and carbon finance advisory.

Sagar regularly participates in conferences and online discussions on social entrepreneurship and he used to maintain a popular blog on SocialEdge.Org (a Skoll Foundation website) focusing on the topic of Social Entrepreneurship in India. He has also been a guest writer for World Resources Institute's website NextBillion.Net. He is passionate about using technology and distributed renewable energy systems for social and economic development in developing regions of the world. Sagar has an MBA from the University of Oxford's Said Business School.

Ramon Roca

Ramon was born 43 years ago in Gurb, a small village located in the rural area in the country-side of Catalonia.

Began working for the IT industry in the late 80's and has accrued more than 20 years of experience working for leading companies of the IT industry. At 1,987 joined Nixdorf Computer, and at 1,990 joined Oracle Corporation and developed there several responsibilities until today: Ramon is still working for Oracle.

Simultaneously, has been involved in many social projects and initiatives and taken part in community based groups helping in some developments. One is guifi.net, which have promoted the deployment of open telecommunications networks, based on peer to peer connection agreements, since 2004. Participants connect their own network segment with others. The network is open, free and neutral: Open because do publish complete information about how it works and its components, allowing the participation of everyone who is interested; Free because the conditions are the same for everyone: Do not have a single or corporative owner who may impose unilateral conditions on others; and Neutral because the extent of the peer to peer agreement is limited to the terms of connectivity only, and not the content. Ramon was taking part of that with the aim of providing broadband to the rural area where he was born. Now guifi.net has more than 7,000 homes connected to it, and 9,000 kilometers of connections, is growing at double digit rate, and all of this by developing a sustainable model where the network is open and is being built by the users.

On 2,007 got the National Prize from the Government of Catalonia for providing affordable broadband to rural areas, on 2,008, guifi.net established a Foundation. Ramon is the President of the Foundation.

Now guifi.net is looking for new generation networks by combining wireless technlogies and fiber optics and applying those technologies by creating innovative, fair and sustainable business models for any territory, including developing countries.

Umar Saif, LUMS Pakistan

Prof. Umar Saif is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at LUMS University, Pakistan. Dr. Umar Saif received his academic training from LUMS, Cambridge and MIT. He did his BSc (Hons) from LUMS (1998), PhD from University of Cambridge (2001) and Postdoctorate from MIT (2002). Dr. Saif worked and taught at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) as a research scientist for four years, where he was part of the group (O2S) that developed system technologies for project Oxygen – a US$28 million project sponsored by the US Department of Defense (DARPA) and an industrial Alliance of world-class companies including Nokia, HP, Compaq, NTT DoCommo, Phillips, Acer and Delta. While at MIT, Dr. Saif also managed the multi-million dollar collaboration on future computing technologies between University of Cambridge and MIT sponsored by the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) and a consortium of hightech British companies. Dr. Saif's research interests broadly span areas of Business Process Engineering, Information Management Systems, Distributed Systems, Mobile Systems, Network Protocols and Architectures and ICT for developing world countries. Dr. Saif has authored several influential publications and is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. Dr. Saif has served on the program committees of several top conferences in his field, including ICTD (2008), WWW (2008), SIGCOMM NSDR (2007, 2008), IEEE Percom (2005, 2006), IEEE/ACM ANCS (2006, 2008), MobiSys (2004) and IEEE ICCD (2006). At LUMS, Dr. Saif leads the Dritte.org international consortium (http://www.dritte.org) for research in developing-world technologies, along with collaborators from MIT, Princeton and UC Berkeley. Dritte.org is funded by Microsoft Research, US State Department, PITB and HEC. Dr. Saif’s research has been featured in popular media, including BBC Online (Goal-oriented systems), New Scientist (Poor Man’s Broadband), MIT Technology Review (DonateBandwidth.net), Distributed Systems Online (Pervasive Computing), and Dawn News. His research has received grants from Microsoft Research (MSR), Oxygen Consortium at MIT, Cambridge- MIT Institute (CMI), US State Department/USAID, HEC and PITB.

Dr. Saif was awarded the MIT Technovator Award in 2008 for his work on grassroots technologies, IEEE Mark Weiser Award at Percom'08, Digital Inclusion Award from Microsoft Research in 2006 and the IDG CIO Technology Pioneer Award n 2008. During his doctorate studies, Dr .Saif was a Trinity College Overseas Scholar and Commonwealth Scholar atUniversity of Cambridge.

Dr. Saif has (co-)founded three technology startups: BumpIn.com, SeeNreport.com and ChOpaal.pk. In 2008, Dr. Saif became the founding chairman of the board of the first start-up incubator in Pakistan, called SCI (http://www.saifcenter.com).

Kobus Roux

Manager of Emerging Innovations Group at CSIR Meraka Institute.

Kobus Roux is an electronics engineer with 10+ years' experience in the conceptualisation, research and development of RF and wireless systems, network architectures and protocols, and information systems. Interested in applying technology through innovative business models. Extensive experience and understanding of working in rural parts of Africa with bottom-of-the-pyramid and grassroots approaches. Currently involved in the Living Labs, Wireless Africa, Digital Doorways, Infopreneurs and VillageTelco projects.

Stephane Boyera

Stéphane  is W3C Staff since 1995. Leading the W3C Device Independence Working Group since 2001, he has been a key participant in the development and launch of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, managing the Device Description Working Group till the end of 2005. At the same time, Stéphane took also part in the management of the Voice and Multimodal Activities. Since 2006, he is now leading the W3C work on the Mobile Web for Social Development (http://www.w3.org/2008/MW4D/ ), which is looking at how to extend the frontier of the Web to make it relevant, usable and useful for rural communities and under-privileged populations of Developing Countries.

Since its launch in january 2008, Stéphane is also the manager of the EU FP7 project Digital World Forum (http://www.digitalworldforum.eu) focusing on the use of ICT to leverage economic development in Africa and Latin America.

T S Anurag

T S Anurag is Ph.D (Commerce) by the Rani Durgavati University, 2004. Currently he works as research scientist at Media Lab Asia, New Delhi, India. He has more than eight years of experience in the following in Teaching & Training,  Research & Development  Project leadership,  project management and program management and implementation, Program and project planning and formulation, Capacity Building of NGOs, Programme Monitoring & Evaluation. His  main area of Interest is to provide policy inputs at various levels of decision making agencies to promote – ICT4Agri, ICT4D, Small Scale Industries & Business, Vocational Education & Ttraining, Entrepreneurship Development Programmes and Livelihood Generation programmes for rural upliftment. Dr. T S Anurag published/presented   more than 10 contributory and review paper / articles in reviewed journals and conferences.

Inés Bebea-González

Born in Spain in 1983, she received her degree in Telecommunication Engineering in 2008 from Carlos III University in Madrid. In 2004 she moved to Paderborn University in Germany, to continue her studies and start a research in large scale wireless and ad-hoc communication networks, where she contributed to R&D projects belonging Heinz Nixdorf Institute. Since 2005, she has volunteered at various NGO's for Development such as Engineers without Borders Spain and EHAS Foundation, contributing to project design and development as well as in capacity building and users involvement with technology. Latest contributions consist of multimedia and film productions used in educational programs and documentary of projects execution. In 2006 she got involved with UNV-UNITeS Programme for fighting the Digital Divide under the MDGs, and spent six months in a youth initiative for capacity building in computer and internet access in rural areas of Cape Verde. In 2007 and 2008 she worked for Ericsson Network & Services focusing in cellular network deployment and optimization, and also for Intecdom in domotic and voice-based telematic and multimedia services. Since 2008, she follows a Msc in Telecommunication Networks for Developing Countries at Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, and is both project engineer and external consultant at EHAS Foundation. Her current interests are focused in sustainability, technology acceptance, capacity building and users empowerment in ICTD projects, while she is now director of EHAS Sustainability and maintenance project at the Amazonic region of Napo in Peru and she is writing her Master's thesis also in this area.

Karthik Kumar

Karthik Kumar S holds Post graduation in Computer Science and Postgraduate Diploma in Business Administration and is equipped with the right skills to harness develop and deploy Techno-Commercial strategies for the upliftment of society.

He has more than 7 years of experience in ICT and Technology development and deployment. He is a Technical Project Manager with Anchorage. He heads a team of IT professionals, committed to serve the underprivileged society. His main functions include create advancement in the fields of Information Technology for Community Development and Access to Information Technology, technical project planning & management.

Currently he is pursing his M.Tech and PhD in Information Technology Management.

George Sadowski

George Sadowsky studied and taught mathematics at Harvard and received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale.  He worked as a mathematician and programmer, and headed computing centers at the Brookings Institution, Northwestern University and New York University.  At the United Nations, he supported technical assistance projects and has worked in more than 50 developing countries.  He has been a consultant to, inter alia, the U.S. Treasury, UNDP, USAID, W3C, the Swiss Government, and the World Bank.  He has served on Boards of AppliedTheory Corporation,  educational networks CREN and NYSERNet, and the Internet Society where he directed ISOC's Developing Country Network Training Workshops.  More recently he was Executive Director of GIPI, the Global Internet Policy Initiative.  He has written and lectured extensively on ICT and development.