Sharad Singhal is a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, where he has led teams that have developed techniques for monitoring and managing service level agreements; methods for controlling service quality in multi-tier applications; resource allocation and assignment algorithms; as well as architectures for management of large-scale data centers. His current research interests include application of control theory to computing, policy-based system and services management, and large-scale data center management architectures.

Prior to HP, Sharad spent 2 years at Bell Laboratories where he worked on speech coding, and 12 years at Bellcore (now Telecordia) where he both conducted and managed research in a number of areas including speech and video processing, neural networks, middleware and personal communications services.

He received the 2003 Joel S. Birnbaum prize for innovation at HP, and the Harding Bliss prize for his graduate work at Yale University. Dr. Singhal holds 23 patents and has published over 80 papers in a variety of research journals and conferences. Sharad obtained his B. Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and his MS. and PhD degrees from Yale University. He is a member of the IEEE and the Acoustical Society of America.

Ammar Rayes is a Senior Manager at Cisco Systems and Adjunct Professor at San Jose State University. His main areas of expertise include IP Based Smart Services, Network Management and Mobile Wireless. Prior to joining Cisco Systems, he was a Director in the Traffic Capacity Management and Planning Department at Telcordia Technologies (formally Bell Labs).

Dr. Rayes has authored/Co-authored over a hundred papers and patents on advances in numerous communications-related technologies including a book on Network Modeling and Simulation and another on ATM switching and network design . He is currently an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Internet Technology and served as an Advisory Board Member of the Journal of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing. Dr. Rayes is also chairing Cisco Smart Services Patent Council and serving on Cisco University Research Program.

He received his BS and MS Degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1986 and 1988, respectively. He received his Doctor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1994 where he received the Outstanding Graduate Student Award in Telecommunications.