Immersive Media Meets 5G Speaker Bios

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Antoine Cayrol

After a Master II Communication and Media in Assas and a Master II PLA at the Sorbonne Antoine created his production company FATCAT FILMS in 2005. He has since produced four short films and have won numerous awards internationally , dozens of music videos and commercials in the world of luxury and entertainment and 3 transmedia documentary (web / TV / cinema / radio) .
In November 2013, FATCAT FILMS incorporated the audiovisual group
PREMIERE HEURE and became its digital label. In January 2014 Antoie created a second production company specializing in the production of content for virtual reality, OKIO STUDIO, by partnering with Pierre Zandrowicz and Lorenzo Benedetti. In October 2017 he sold OKIO STUDIO to a commercial group and team up with new producers to create a new immersive production company ATLAS 5, in Paris, New York and Los Angeles.

Armen Filipetyan

Armen is a Technical architect of systems and has been building platforms over the course of his 16-year career in the media and entertainment industry.

He got his start at Lowry Digital Images working to build computation systems, networking, and storage management for image processing and restoration. Since then Armen has been building various systems and platforms for studio artist management, project management and automation, tape archiving for dailies, video distribution platforms and pursuing the next generation of virtual reality.

Armen has been spearheading the XR platform development at Digital Domain for the last 4 years, and now leading Iconic Engine team towards 5G and HoloMetric Cinema technology.

Amy Peck

Amy Peck is the founder & CEO of EndeavorVR, a leading global VR/AR (XR) strategy & consulting firm. Amy is a recognized thought-leader in the space and speaks globally on the future of XR. She holds several Advisory Board roles and Co-chairs the VRARA Enterprise Committee.

Amy’s passion for this technology began at Leap Motion where she launched the Enterprise division working with clients across every major vertical including healthcare, entertainment, retail, hospitality, education and government.

It became clear that there was a need to help foster XR development in the commercial arena and more importantly, shepherd these critical early wins. EndeavorVR was conceived for this very purpose.

Her own personal mission is to see XR fundamentally improve every aspect of our lives with the goal of making this technology accessible and transformative for everyone.

Arianne Hinds

Dr. Arianne Hinds is a Principal Architect at CableLabs where she is responsible for the overarching strategy on behalf of CableLabs and its members for immersive media and related technologies. In 2019, she co-founded Immersive Digital Experiences Alliance (IDEA) with the mission to develop an interchange and distribution format for streaming immersive media over commercial networks, i.e. to drive XR displays and light field panels. She is the Chairman of the Board for IDEA, and as well, currently holds the position of INCITS L3.1 Chairman, for which she is the head of the U.S. delegation of experts for participation in ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).

Brent Insko

Christina Heller

Christina is the CEO of Metastage, an XR studio that brings real people and performances into digital worlds through volumetric capture and complementary tools. Metastage is the first US partner for the Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture system and located at The Culver Studios in Los Angeles. Prior to leading Metastage, Christina was the Co-Founder and CEO of VR Playhouse, an immersive content company based out of Los Angeles. Heller currently serves on the Board of Advisors for the VR Base in Europe, XRDC, and the RIT Entertainment Advisory Board. She is a recipient of the Advanced Imaging Society’s 2018 Distinguished Leadership in Technology Award and was named in the Huffington Post as one of 5 women changing the virtual reality scene by Craig Newmark.

Danillo Graziosi

Danillo B. Graziosi is the manager of the Next-Generation Codec Group at Sony’s Research Center in San Jose, CA. The group is actively involved in the standardization of point cloud compression, creating innovative technology that will shape the future of immersive media. Before coming to Sony, Danillo obtained his education in Brazil, Germany and Portugal, and earned his Ph.D in electrical engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. During his research, he has published papers, contributed to standards, and filed patents in the field of 3D data compression. He worked on 3D video coding for Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Boston, and then on light field compression for Ostendo Technologies Inc. in Carlsbad, CA until 2016. His research interests include video/image processing, light fields, and point cloud compression.


Don Eklund

Don is the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment

Esta Chiang

Esta Chiang is the Volumetric Pipeline Technical Director of 8i where she is also responsible for the Business Development. 8i is a volumetric video technology company on a mission to enable people to experience human content and each other in the most realistic way through holograms. Our proprietary technology transforms video from an array of cameras into a 3D hologram of a human that has true volume and can be viewed from any angle, on any device in augmented, virtual or mixed reality. We see the forefront of the 5G world and think our content can help introduce to the world the enormous benefits of 5G.

She has performed lead and critical roles on several notable and distinguished projects such as Buzz Aldrin’s Cycling Pathways to Mars Experience, which received the 2018 Webby and Webby People’s Voice Awards in the VR Branded Cinematic or Pre-Rendered category; the Holo app, which has been downloaded more than 1.6 million times and has been awarded Apple’s “Best of 2017” Augmented Reality Apps, Tom’s Guide Best of 2017 AR, and the Lumiere prize; Walmart Store No. 8 – Bonobos VR Experience; and the Volkswagen VR Experience.

Ferhan Özkan

Ferhan Özkan is leading the mission is to create a global ecosystem of XR innovators and utilize the power of this network for solving the challenges of industry from different verticals. His influential journey started when he founded a pre-incubation center funded by World Bank, guiding 8 startups to successful industry exits. Soon afterwards, he established the digital platform Playstore.com for a telco operator distributing games of the top AAA publishers worldwide. The platform still continues to become one of the most profitable Value Added Services overall.

As elected Vice-Chair of the IEEE VR/AR Standards Group, he works on bringing the industry closer, while focusing on empowering the major stakeholders with his expertise and global network. He founded XR First, a global organization which has already attracted over 410 startup clusters and 800 universities from all around the world to join on its mission of the democratization of innovation. At various conferences, he is passionately addressing to a wide range of audience sharing his vision on the upcoming leap of immersive transformation.

Gary Radburn

Gary Radburn is the Director of VR/AR globally at Dell Inc. As part of his role, he manages the team charged with developing and delivering VR/AR technology, works closely with Dell customers on VR/AR deployments and founded Dell’s VR Centers of Excellence with locations around the world for businesses and consumers to experience and learn more about VR in the real world. With more than 27 years of experience in the technology industry, ranging from Engineering to Sales and Marketing, Gary has had experience across all aspects of designing successful products and solutions and bringing them to market. He has worked for companies such as Digital Equipment, 3Com and, for the past 16 years at Dell. Originating from the UK, where he managed the OptiPlex client business for EMEA, he went on to lead the Workstation Solutions team in the US and then championed graphics virtualization for engineering applications. This has now progressed into other domains and with the fast adoption of VR and AR solutions, Gary has taken the helm for driving this exciting new area of business.

Ludovic Noblet

Ludovic graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique de l’Universite de Nantes with a specialty in electronics, signal processing and real-time computing systems. Ludovic started his career in 1992 at the Thomson Electronics Research Labs. Until 2004, he worked advancing and delivering technologies for digital TV broadcast, first for the US markets and then European ones. In 2001, he took part into the very first IPTV and mobile TV projects. He joined France Telecom in 2004 as an IPTV architect where he managed the technical aspects for the introduction of high definition into the Orange IPTV service. In 2006, he continued his career at Orange Labs and was named Head of the R&D lab devoted to video compression. He joined Dolby Laboratories Inc in 2010 in San Francisco as a Senior Director, in charge of technology consistency for new video initiatives under incubation and maturation such as Dolby Vision. In 2012, he was appointed Senior Director, Principal Architect, for the Broadcast business unit of Dolby Laboratories, in charge of technology strategy and planning for Dolby AC-4.

Ludovic joined b<>com in 2014 as Director in charge of Intellectual Property & Licensing. Since 2016, Ludovic is also in charge of the Hypermedia Research Labs. Ludovic is involved in standardization bodies such as DVB and industry fora such as the VR Industry Forum and more recently the Media Coding Industry Forum


Gregory Jones

Greg Jones is the Global Manager of Business Development for AR/VR at NVIDIA. Dr. Jones’ team focuses on partnerships and projects that bring the benefits of real-time, immersive rendering to enterprise environments. Before coming to NVIDIA Greg was the Associate Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah.  The SCI Institute is a 200-person research institute focused on scientific computing, image analysis, computer graphics and data visualization.

Jan Söderström

From 2013 to early 2018 Jan was having several leadership positions within the Ericsson cloud transformation program: Head of the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) -program, Head of Product line Cloud and Head of Target Area Cloud. Prior to this Jan had a decade long engagement at Ericsson Research heading the research in IP and Cloud. During this time he spent three years in Silicon Valley building up the Ericsson research lab in San Jose. He started the Ericsson engagement in SDN and Openflow in cooperation with the Stanford Cleanslate project and his team also pioneered the Ericsson work on Openstack and cloud orchestration.

Jan has a PhD in Applied Physics from Chalmers University of Technology and spent his early industrial career working with optoelectronic devices and optical networking  at Ericsson Microelectronics, first as development manager and later as product line head.

Jan Söderström is V.P. and Head of Technology Office Silicon Valley at Ericsson reporting to Ericsson Group CTO.  In this capacity he drives the Ericsson technology leadership work in 5G, Cloud and IOT in a collaboration with ecosystem partners in Silicon Valley. 

Jeff Solari

Jeff Solari is the Strategic Planner for Virtual Reality at Intel. His role is to make sure that current and future Intel products are optimized to deliver the best VR experience possible. Previously, he was planner for computer vision and imaging. Prior to Intel, he was CEO of Native Instinct, a mobile app and web development company, whose achievements include the development of the software for the hugely successful Flip video camera. He uses VR to play immersive puzzle games.

Jyrki Penttinen

Jyrki Penttinen, Technology Manager, GSMA North America, has worked in mobile telecommunications in Finland, Spain, Mexico and the USA. He has experience in research and operational activities for both radio and core network domains, including planning, optimization, measurements, system architectures and services. Since 2014, he focused on security solutions and developing industry trends. At present, he assists operator members with the adoption, design, development, and deployment of GSMA specifications and programmes.

Martin Renschler

Martin Renschler is a Senior Director Technology at Qualcomm’s Multimedia Research and Development unit in San Diego. Since 2012, he leads the Augmented and Virtual Reality Systems Architecture team whose focus is to optimize Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor in regards to providing key XR technology enablers. He is also active in the Khronos OpenXR standardization process and in his former life at Ericsson, he was a 3GPP SA2 system architecture standardization delegate.

Morgan Bouchet

Morgan has more than 20 years experiences in “Digital” & “Innovation”, he is Digital Content Director and Head of AR/VR at the Orange Content division. He began his career in 1997 in Communication group “TBWA” (Omnicom Group), French leader in 360° communications specializing in the field of entertainment, (clients: Sony, Universal Studios, Warner Bros, Edelman, PlayStation,…). He joined Orange/France Telecom in 2000 to market and develop content-related activities (Video On Demand, Music on Demand, Video Live Streaming…). Morgan is in charge of Innovation & Digital Content @Orange Content  (XR, new formats, blockchain,…)
Morgan teaches “Transmedia & Digital content strategies” at SciencesPo (France) and he is President of the UNI-XR.org (nonprofit association), a French XR ThinkTank based in Paris. He represents Orange Group as Chairman of the New European Media initiative

Rolf Muralt

Rolf Muralt is the Vice President of Product Management at MobiledgeX, leading the overall product strategy and roadmap. MobiledgeX is building a marketplace of edge resources and services that will connect developers with the world’s largest mobile networks to power the next generation of applications and devices. Prior to MobiledgeX, Rolf was the Vice President of Product Management at Silver Peak where he led the company’s pivot from WAN optimization into the SD-WAN market by launching the EdgeConnect product line, recognized as a Leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN edge infrastructure. Rolf headed up product management at Pluribus Networks from the company’s Series A to Series C rounds, pioneering the network hypervisor for merchant silicon switches and rack-scale architectures such as Ericsson’s HDS 8000. He also held senior product management roles for Cisco’s Unified Computing System and ASR 1000 edge routing platforms. Rolf started his career as part of the Stanford team that built the first terabit switch. Rolf holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and an MBA from UBC. He is an elected expert for the Innovation Council of Switzerland.


Sebastian Sylwan

Sebastian Sylwan is a renowned and respected Visual Effects and Digital Media Technology Executive.

Sebastian is currently developing novel and exciting live‑action Virtual Reality experiences and the cameras, pipeline and tools to produce them as CTO & Creative partner of Felix & Paul Studios, a Montreal-based Cinematic Virtual Reality startup widely recognized as pioneers in the nascent medium and for having produced the highest quality experiences to date including Jurassic World – Apatosaurus, Miyubi, Inside the box of Kurios, and The People’s House – Inside the White House with Barack and Michelle Obama.

Previously, Sylwan was Director of Technology at Digital Domain, an Academy Award-winning VFX facility. He successfully renewed Digital Domain’s technology infrastructure while maintaining the legacy value of over 13 years and helped it venture into new areas like the development of the facility’s first stereoscopic rendition of a CG animated film as well as well-known renditions of Digital Humans.

Sylwan serves in numerous advisory boards and industry committees, such as the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Sci-Tech Awards Committee and DITS subcommittee, the VES Technology Committee where he is the current chair, and the ASC-ADG-VES committee on Previsualization where he co-led with Alex McDowell the Previs 2020 group, later spun-off as the Virtual Production Committee.

Scot Barbour

Serhad Doken

Serhad drives Technology Innovation at Verizon to build a 5G Ecosystem team working with Startups, VCs, Accelerators/Incubators, Research Labs, Academia and other Corporate Innovation Units. Prior to Verizon, Serhad was Vice President of Innovation Partners group focused on technology strategy and external partnerships at Interdigital, a Nasdaq listed Mobile R&D Company. Prior to Interdigital, he was at Qualcomm Corporate R&D in San Diego working on emerging mobile technology incubation. Serhad worked at Cisco Systems between 2000 and 2008 on Voice and Video IP networking product development. He was with Nortel Networks between 1994 and 2000 developing SS7 protocols to early VoIP products. Serhad started his career in 1993, at PSI AG in Germany, an Industrial M2M technology provider. He has a Computer Engineering degree and holds 7 granted US and 11 worldwide patents, 12 US and 72 worldwide applications. He has completed M&A Executive Education Program at UPenn Wharton, New Ventures Executive Education Program at Harvard Business School.

Simon Gunkel

Simon N. B. Gunkel is a R&D Scientist at TNO, the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research in The Hague. He received a master’s degree in computer science in 2012, both from the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea. His ongoing efforts in applied research cover a wide range of topics in multimedia, such as virtual reality communication, video conferencing, and quality of experience. Currently his main focus is in the topic of web-based photo-realistic Social VR, involving aspects of the user, system, and network. This is also the topic of Simon’s ongoing PhD research in collaboration with the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), in Amsterdam (Netherlands). Part of his work includes leading the technical work package in the Horizon 2020 project VRTogether (http://vrtogether.eu/). Furthermore, Simon is currently holding a board position as Technology Manager in YEAR (Young European Associated Researchers network, http://www.year-network.com/).

Tim Porter

Timothy Porter is the CTO of Underminer Studios and pioneer in Visualization Technology. He earned a BS in Computer Animation from Full Sail University. His work in Video Games began as an animator and grew into a Technical Artist role and later in movies as a Pipeline Technical Director. After living in five cities in four years he settled in Austin, Texas with his family and co-founded Underminer to infuse entertainment paradigms into business tools by combining the power of immersive visuals in XR and data using AI and other emerging technologies. He was recognized as a 2017 and 2018 Top Innovator by Intel.

Paul Higgs

Gilles Teniou

Gilles Teniou received the Master’s degree in Engineering Computer Vision, from the Education and Research department in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Rennes, France. He has been Head of video coding standardization activities at Orange. Gilles is currently Senior Standardization Manager on Content and TV services at Orange. He is in charge of managing the technical and operational standardization activities related to TV & Audiovisual Services including service architecture, technologies used for audiovisual streams (media formats and protocols) as well as the application environment used for TV. In 3GPP, Gilles is the Vice Chair of the 3GPP SA4 Working Group and the chairman of the Video Sub-Working Group.

Frédéric Gabin

Thomas Stockhammer

Mauricio Aracena

Rob Koenen

Rob Koenen is a co-Founder and the Chief Business Officer of Tiledmedia, the leading tiled VR streaming company. Rob is a co-founder of the VR Industry Forum, and served as its first President.

Mr. Koenen has held many leading roles in multimedia standardization initiatives. He chaired MPEG’s Requirements Group from 1996 to 2005, and played a key role in the development of the MPEG-4 standard. He initiated the MPEG Industry Forum in 1999, and served as its President for the first five years, successfully bringing MPEG-4 technology from a paper specification to a dominant market force.