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Biographies

Dalia Adib Principal Consultant, STL Partners Dalia is a Principal Consultant at STL Partners, a research and consulting firm based in the UK and providing advisory services to the telecoms industry globally. She has led strategy projects with telecoms operators and technology companies in North America, Europe and Asia on a host of technologies, including 5G, edge computing and private cellular networks. Within the topic of blockchain specifically, she has conducted research on blockchain use cases in the telecoms industry since 2018 and is a lead author on the report Moving beyond the lab: How to make blockchain pay. Recently, she set up STL Partners Edge Computing Practice and focused on the interrelationship between blockchain and edge computing
Ruifeng Hu Associate Rapporteur, ITU-T SG16 Q22 / Research Director, Huawei Cloud Services Ruifeng Hu is the Research Director of Huawei Cloud Services. He has been dedicated on technology innovation for more than ten years. From year 2015 on, he is focused on blockchain technology and actively involved with open source communities and standard bodies in this area. He created Hyperledger Caliper project for blockchain performance benchmarking and also served ITU Focus Group DLT as Working Group 3 Champion to build reference architecture and assessment criteria. Now he works with ITU as associate Rapporteur of "Distributed Legder Technology and E-services" under ITU-T Study Group 16.
David Wei Liang Director, Blockchain R&D Department, China Telecom Research David Wei Liang is currently the director of blockchain branch in China Telecom R&D department. Before that, he was a senior researcher in Huawei Hong Kong lab and received his Ph.D degree in Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Thomas Spencer Director, Industry Business Unit Lead for Telecoms, R3 Thomas Spencer is the Industry Business Unit Lead for Telecoms at R3. R3 are a leading enterprise blockchain software providers working with corporates and ISVs across many industries to design and develop decentralised applications that transform business processes. Thomas leads the team at R3 that works with clients across the telecommunications sector to develop and implement blockchain enabled applications across a wide range of use cases – such as intercarrier settlement, fraud management, infrastructure optimisation and IoT.
Shahar Steiff AVP - New Technologies, PCCW Global Shahar Steiff joined PCCW Global in 2001, 19 years ago. PCCW Global is an Technology Company based in Hong-Kong. Though being a relatively small carrier compared to other Telco giants, PCCW Global has excelled in wholesale trading through a unique blend of commercial and technical approaches to business. During his tenure at PCCW Global, Shahar served through Sales, Pre-Sales, Product Development, Business Development, IT and engineering, through which he established a thorough understanding of the Telco world from a wide array of perspectives. Shahar has been involved in Standard bodies and industry projects in the past 10 years starting with the OSS-ICDS Forum which he has chaired and co-chaired for a few terms. He has been involved with ONF, NGMN, ONAP, MEF as well as several ETSI projects. For the past three years, he has been deeply involved with GLF (Global Leaders’ Forum) CBAN (Communication Business Automation Network) developing Blockchain based settlement governance structure. In addition to his involvement in external standard bodies, Shahar is also involved in the development and adoption of new technologies within PCCW Global. Of which to mention the integration of the Console-Connect network automation platform into the PCCW Global portfolio, and the successful implementation of PoCs using a combination of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence. His current focus is development of PCCW Global automation platform enabling automated lifecycle management across a wholesale supply chain of ICT service providers.