Governing Board

Cole Crawford is CEO and founder of Vapor IO, creators of the Kinetic Edge and the leading provider of tower-connected edge colocation and interconnection services. He was previously the founding executive director of the Open Compute Project and a co-founder of OpenStack. He is a founding board member of the Open19 Foundation and has been a thought leader in data center technology for over a decade. He is leading Vapor IO in developing the largest nationwide edge colocation and interconnection platform at the edge of the cellular network. Cole has been named to Data Economy’s list of The World’s Most Influential Data Economy Leaders and The World’s First Top 50 Edge Computing Influencers.

Daniel currently serves as a Senior Technical Program Manager at the CTO office at OSIsoft, focusing on technology, research and innovation projects related to IIoT, Open Source and Energy (Distributed Energy Resources). Daniel acts as technical liaison for strategic partners and represents OSIsoft at the Industrial Internet Consortium. Prior to joining OSIsoft in 2010, Daniel collaborated in various international research and development projects related to both edge and cloud.

Daniel holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Valladolid University (Spain) and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Aalborg University (Denmark).

Dave Landsman is the Director Industry Standards at Western Digital.

Engineering Technologist, Office of the CTO at Dell

Ed Knapp is the corporate CTO for American Tower.  He is responsible for leading the company’s global innovation program, technology investments and platform extension strategies. His areas of interest include power and energy, mobile edge computing, open fiber network networks and advanced wireless connectivity.

Prior to joining American Tower in 2017, as Senior Vice President of Engineering at Qualcomm, Ed Knapp was responsible for their New Jersey Corporate Research Center from which he managed a diverse engineering team of wireless researchers and product engineering staff across India, Israel and the US. Mr. Knapp has more than 39 years of communications technology experience with over 30 years invested in the development of the global wireless industry from 1G to 5G, including CxO leadership roles in 3 start-ups.

He received a master’s of business administration from Columbia University, his master’s of science degree in electrical engineering from Polytechnic University (NYU) in New York, and a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Stony Brook University. Ed currently has 5 granted US patents and 1 pending application.

External Boards:

• Director AST SpaceMobile (Nasdaq: ASTS)
• Director Center for Automotive Research – CAR (non-profit)

He is responsible for leading technology strategy, product portfolio evolution, system architectures, platform engineering, and organic and inorganic innovations to ensure F5’s leadership position in multi-cloud application services. Meet the diverse needs of NetOps, SecOps, and AppDev communities, and support our customers’ transformation journey towards application-centric digital businesses.

Hatsumi is the Senior Director of Strategic Planning Unit in Fujitsu Ltd. She is currently responsible for the open source and community strategy, and leading to create 5G era global network & business architecture. Her previous roles included director positions of both Product Planning and Business Management of global photonic business. She was assigned to Texas US for more than 8 years and her main business has been for big carries in US market.

She has BS for Mathematical Statistics, and resides in Kawasaki city, Japan.

Henry leads system and software architecture for HP retail, hospitality, healthcare products and solutions. Henry has over 30 years of experience developing embedded systems, VOIP gateways, and mobile phones from startups to global companies.

Henry holds a M.S. in Computer Engineering from University of Southern California and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of California San Diego.

Jason Shepherd is VP of Ecosystem at IoT Edge orchestration company ZEDEDA. Prior to joining ZEDEDA, Jason was CTO for the Dell Technologies Edge and IoT Solutions Division. His proven track record as a thought leader in the market is evidenced through his leadership building up the award-winning Dell IoT Solutions Partner Program and establishing the vendor-neutral, open source EdgeX Foundry project to facilitate greater interoperability at the IoT edge. Jason is active various industry efforts focused on IoT and edge computing and was recognized as one of the Top 100 Industrial IoT influencers of 2018 and 2019. He has spent his career in roles spanning CTO, engineering and marketing functions and holds 14 granted and over 20 pending US patents.

Jim St. Leger has been creating, nurturing, and growing open source projects for more than ten years. He was part of the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and the Fast Data I/O (FD.io) open source project creation teams. Today he holds community leadership roles in DPDK and LF Edge. His focus is on networking and edge computing projects. His personal pursuits include lifelong learning, outdoor recreation, and advancing STEM disciplines.

Jim Xu is a principal Engineer at Zenlayer. Zenlayer is an innovative company in the Edge Cloud business. Before joining Zenlayer, he was a Tech Leader in Cisco’s flagship products, a Principal Engineer at Futurewei Technologies enterprise networking and Edge Computing products. He also partnered with several companies before, on the Edge Computing IoT and on Decentralized Cloud. He has been granted over 20 US and international patents. He was actively involved in early DPDK community, managed the ODL projects within company, and advocated blockchain and Hyperledger technologies across other partners.

Coming Soon

Kaniz Mahdi is Vice President of Distributed Edge at VMware. Kaniz is leading a multi-faceted global team of research scientists, architects and developers specializing in advanced technologies that sit at the intersection of Wireless, Cloud and AI in the VMWare Office of the CTO. Key focus includes user-centric research and co-innovation with industry and academia to unravel the complexities of Distributed Edge Cloud systems. The outputs of these research and co-innovation efforts will drive recommendations for VMware’s strategic evolution in this space.

Prior to VMware, Kaniz held various technology leadership positions at Ericsson, Huawei, Ciena and Nortel.

With 45+ patent grants, Kaniz has a stellar record of continuously pushing the envelope on new technologies. She is an inventor of essential technologies underpinning current Voice over LTE systems and has been instrumental in defining the 5G era landscape with disruptive technologies (e.g. SDN/NFV & O-RAN).

KJ is Director – Inventive Science at AT&T, where he leads the Network Cloud Infrastructure Research lab.

Lisa Caywood is a Principal Community Architect at Red Hat, focusing on projects and communities of interest to the telco and manufacturing industries. She serves as the Red Hat representative on the LF Edge Board and Magma Core Outreach Committee. She has a long history with Linux Foundation networking and telco communities, starting with OpenDaylight while with a founding member company, and later serving as Marketing Director for LF Networking and LF Edge while at the Linux Foundation itself.

Martin Bäckström is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board & The Head of Industry Area Datacom. Martin is responsible for leading ICT technology convergence and fostering co-operation between industries in areas such as Software Defined Infrastructure, Virtualization, Cloud, Analytics, Automation, Digitalization, and IoT. Prior to this position, Martin joined Smart and PLDT in Manila in The Philippines as The Chief Technology and Information Advisor for several years. His previous positions in Ericsson include being head of Radio Technology Development, Principal designer for GPRS and Packet PDC, and CTO for Ericsson APAC Innovation. Martin has been actively participating in ICT technology evolutions from 2G, 3G, to 4G and 5G and actively leading engagements related to standardization and open source projects to drive for convergence and harmonization.

Coming Soon

Dr. (Peter) Moonki Hong has been taking responsibilities for technical and business enabling project management based on Edge/IoT open source ecosystem in Samsung Electronics. His open source contributions span from IoTivity and EdgeX Foundry to Home Edge Project in LF Edge since 2014 and he has one a several award like Outstanding Contributor Award from OCF (Open Connectivity Foundation) in 2017. He is currently leading Samsung’s open source activities in Home Edge in LF Edge, ONAP (Open Networking Automation Platform) in LF Networking, and O-RAN SC (Software Community) and so on, which must be core components to build up the innovative ecosystem in 5G and beyond 5G regarding open source projects. He is also a Samsung representative of OPC (Open Platform Communications) Foundation.

Vice President, Technology & Strategy at Radisys.

Mr. Ren Xudong（Bill Ren）is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board. He also serves as the General Manager of ICT Infrastructure Open Source Business at Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, and as the chief liaison officer of Huawei. He is fully responsible for the implementation of open source solutions for operators/enterprises in the network automation industry, using open source means to build industrial ecology, expand industrial space, build a healthy and harmonious industrial environment, and support the success of the company’s business.

Bill Ren holds a Bachelor Degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University. Since Joining Huawei in 1998，Bill served as an Intelligent Network Research and Development Engineer, Product Manager and Architect of India Branch, General Manager of Business OSS, Vice President of Network OSS, Vice President of Network OSS Strategy and MKT, Vice President of Solution MKTG, etc. He has accumulated rich experience in R&D, marketing and product management.

Renu N. Navale is vice president in the Data Platforms Group and general manager of the smart edge platforms division at Intel Corporation. She is responsible for overall strategy, software and platforms that strengthen Intel’s presence in the network edge computing business sector. She also leads ecosystem enabling for the Network Platforms Group (NPG) to accelerate network and edge transformation, and she fosters scale and industrywide collaboration through open source initiatives.

Ryan Anderson is the Architect in Residence for IBM in San Francisco and Platform Strategist for IBM’s CTO Group for Edge.

Ryan focus is on use cases and design patterns that create value at the Edge.  Use cases include applying predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning for IT, OT, IOT and Industry 4.0 applications; and leveraging 5G for next generation networks and new media.

Other areas of interest include: sensemaking systems for situational awareness; empathetic and emotionally intelligent systems; identity for AI systems using “character cartridges”; and the Translational Research Institute for Space Health, part of NASA’s Human Research Program.

Ryan is a supporter of STEM initiatives and enjoys working in his home lab with his kids, building sorting hats, voice-controlled vehicles, and EEG controlled candy dispensers.  He holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and an MBA from Cambridge University.

She is an experienced executive in the software technology sector. She brings a diverse skill set and expertise to mimik, including sales, business strategy, product management, and engineering. She has been with the company from an early stage and has made significant contributions to the development of the company and its products.

Prior to joining mimik in 2010, she held key leading positions at startups Mobidia and L3 Technology and before that she was with Sage Software. At Mobidia, Sam was part of a leading sales team, worked closely with the sales and engineering teams internally and held a key customer facing position focused on delivering network optimization solutions to large mobile operators. At Sage she held various positions including leading a product specialists’ team and delivering the right business software solutions to the business partners’ channel.

Sam holds degree in Electro-Mechanical Engineering from University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada.

Tina Tsou is an innovator and a visionary with far-reaching accomplishments within the technical engineering realm. As Arm’s Enterprise Architect, Tina serves in the highly visible Technical Lead role for the Enterprise Open Source Enablement team, where she analyzes, designs, and implements robust strategies to establish first tier status for Arm’s architecture within open source communities and projects. Tina also serves as Arm’s Edge Computing Team Lead. As the company’s open source thought leader, she builds powerful partnerships with and influences open source communities in support of multiple architectures. Tina previously served as the Digital Domain Expert (Connectivity) for Philips Lighting, where she implemented NB-IoT in an outdoor carrier project with China Mobile and Huawei. She released Bluetooth + ZigBee combo chip architecture and delivered connectivity hardware/software platform (ZigBee 3.0, Wi-Fi). The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted Tina 100+ patents. She earned her Bachelor of Computer Science degree from Xi’an University of Architecture and Technologies. Tina was the first woman to chair an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group from a Chinese business enterprise and was the youngest Asian rapporteur in ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) history. She currently serves as Chair of the Akraino Technical Steering Committee.

Tom is the co-founder and CEO of Dianomic, a major contributor of the LF-Edge project “Fledge”; an open source framework and community for the industrial edge focused on critical operations. Fledge developers build smarter, better, cheaper industrial solutions for: condition-based monitoring, predictive maintenance, smarter machines and situational awareness all integrated with the operator’s existing “brown field” systems.

Tom is a serial computer software and services entrepreneur with broad experience in networking, security, database and cloud-based service offers. Tom and his teams have raised over $400M in funding and had 5 exits totaling more than $3.5B.

Walid Negm is Altran’s Group Chief Innovation Officer and has responsibility for bringing the latest innovations to clients through R&D activity in Altran global centers. He is a member of Altran’s Global Executive Committee. In addition to overseeing Altran’s technology strategy, Walid is responsible for new capability (including Open Source software) development in strategic areas of 5G/Edge, Digital Therapeutics, ADAS/AD and VTOL/ Electrification. Walid launched the Open Source and co-innovation model at Altran accelerating innovation in SDN/NFV, Blockchain and Cyber Security and is currently a member of the Linux Foundation Edge (LF Edge) Governing Board. Previously, Walid was Accenture’s global lead of R&D and helped launched Accenture’s cloud platform and established Accenture’s Washington, DC cyber defense lab. Walid co-founded network security and mobile infrastructure startups and earned his bachelor and master of science in computer engineering from Boston University. He earned his masters of business administration from Georgetown University.

Previously, Wenjing was a Distinguished Engineer at Dell Research and a Chief Architect at VMware. He was an entrepreneurial technologist in the startups Sentient Networks, Inc. and WiFi pioneer Airespace, Inc., both of which were acquired by Cisco and whose flagship products became major business lines at Cisco Systems. He was a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco and also held the position of Senior Director of Product Management in Security at Nokia.

Mr. Yachen Wang is the General Manager of Wireless and IoT Network Center in Tencent. He is mainly leading in Tencent IoT Network, 5G, edge computing, Radio and wireless network related technical research, platform development and network deployment. before Mr. Yachen Wang joined in Tencent, he was the Deputy General Manager of Network Technology and AI R&D Center in China Mobile, President of ONAP, Vice Chair of Linux Networking Fund including ONAP, ODL, OPNFV etc. and Vice-Chairman of ITU-T SG13 IMT-2020/5G Working Party. He has much experience in 4G/5G, NFV/SDN, network evolution, international standardization, and open source etc.