Ali Tizghadam is a member of TELUS team acting as Principal Technology Architect for network softwarization. Ali earned his PhD from Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Toronto in 2009. Before pursuing his PhD Ali has been working for over 10 years in Telecom Industry and he led the design and architecture of an award-winning homegrown Digital Local Exchange in Middle East during 90’s. Ali is currently leading a TELUS initiative to build an intent-based open platform to enable composing automation and traffic engineering use-cases as well as innovative services in a model-driven environment. Ali leads multiple projects within the umbrella of this initiative, including (but not limited to): 1) Transforming traffic engineering practices in TELUS backbone core from a reactive mode to proactive and automatic mode using software-defined networking 2) Building a multi-purpose data orchestration platform in order to offer raw data, information and knowledge as a service to internal and external customers (including control software blocks), 3) Creating a fully model-driven service composition / orchestration platform spanning PNFs and VNFs seamlessly, 4) Automating a large body of use-cases and scenarios in a unified way.
Ali is a frequent speaker and panel participant in conferences, here is a short list of some of the 2017-18 events in which Ali has spoken or attended as panelist:

1) “Intelligence Dissemination: Order From Chaos” (Speaker), Open Networking Summit, LA, CA 2018 https://onsna18.sched.com/event/Dm5F/intelligence-dissemination-order-from-chaos-ali-tizghadam-telus-communications-inc
2) “Autonomic Networking in Action” (Speaker), MPLS+SDN+NFV, Paris, France 2018
https://www.uppersideconferences.com/mpls-sdn-nfv/mplswc2018_agenda_day_01.html/
3) “Securing Cities – Challenges and Opportunities” (Panelist), IEEE Smart City Conference (ISC2) , Kansas City, MO 2018 http://sites.ieee.org/isc2-2018/panel-program/
4) “The Transformation Path to 5G and Large Scale IoT” (Panelist), CENGEN Annual summit, Ottawa, Canada Dec 2017
https://www.cengn.ca/cengn-summit-2017-panel-1/
5) “Abstracting Brownfield in Control Layer” (Speaker), Open Networking Summit, Santa Clara, CA 2017
6) https://ons2017.sched.com/event/9ksw/abstracting-brown-field-in-control-layer-ali-tizghadam-telus
7) “IoT in Action – Architecting, Securing & Scaling Applications” (Panelist), Open Networking Summit , Santa Clara, CA 2017
https://ons2017.sched.com/event/9ksi/panel-discussion-iot-in-action-architecting-securing-scaling-applications-moderated-by-cliff-grossner-elizabeth-cruz-ihs-markit
8) “Service Provider’s Traffic Engineering Practice Shift: Use Case Oriented vs Platform Oriented” (Speaker), Network Virtualization and SDN Europe, Madrid, Spain 2017
https://www.crunchbase.com/event/network-virtualization-sdn-europe-2017-2017529