Workshop on
Selected Items
on Telecommunication Quality Matters
27 - 28 November 2012
Vienna, Austria
SPEAKERS’ BIOGRAPHIES
http://www.etsi.org/
Dr. Wolfgang Balzer is one of the founders and managing directors of Focus Infocom, a
company specializing in testing systems for mobile communication networks.
He finished his university education with a PhD, working in the field of Laser Physics and
Nonlinear Optics. During this time, he worked as an Assistant Professor, gathering
expertise e.g. in areas like optical measurement technologies and automated
measurement systems. He spent his post-doc assignment with Mitsubishi Electric in Osaka
working on optical neurochip research.
Today, his principal responsibilities at Focus Infocom are Business Development, product
evolution, technical sales, marketing and key account management.
With a broad technical expertise in object oriented programming languages and software
architecture as well as in mobile network technologies, special fields of work are testing strategies, QoS and
QoE. In the ETSI context, Dr. Balzer works in the STQ MOBILE standardization group.
Sebastian Egger studied electrical engineering at Graz University of Technology and
Sociology at University of Graz. After his graduations in 2007 he joined the
Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (FTW) as a Researcher where he is working
on QoE evaluation in the domains of human to human mediated interaction, interactive
data services and online video. In 2012 he was visiting researcher at the SISCom
International Research Chair “Future Telecommunication Systems where he was working
on QoE related topics. Since 2010 he participates in standardization activities of the ITU-T
Performance, QoS and QoE where he serves as editor for several working items.
Christoph Furer graduated at the Ingenieurschule Biel in Electrotechnics in 1989. He
worked for 5 years for Ascom in the payphone division doing telephony hardware
development.
Since 1994 he works for Swisscom in the network development departement, with the
main topics being at the beginning telephony terminal testing (transmission parameters
inlcuding the acoustic interface), then shifting towards end-to-end Quality of Service for
speech and other voiceband services. He is an active member of ITU-T SG12 and ETSI
STQ. In 2003 he finished postgraduate studies in telecommunications at the Eduswiss
engineering school.
Valerie Gautier-Turbin received B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics from the
University of Brest in 1992 and 1993 respectively. After studying signal processing and
telecommunications at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications of Brest,
she joined France Télécom in 1995 (R&D labs) and obtained a PhD in Telecommunications
and Signal Processing from the University of Rennes 1 for her work on acoustic echo
cancellation in 1998 (combination of adaptive and optimal filterings to perform acoustic
echo cancellation in a teleconference context). Since then, she is involved in many projects
dealing with speech processing, voice enhancement and quality evaluation. She has been
contributing to ITU-T Study Group 15 from 1995 and to ITU-T Study Group 12 from 2000
(she served as a Rapporteur of Study Group 12 from 2001 to 2004). She also contributes
to 3GPP/SA4 activities on speech quality items, especially on the instrumental evaluation of noise reduction
features embedded in mobile devices. She is involved in the specifications for the HD Voice logo from
GSMA.”
Dr.-Ing. H. W. Gierlich started his professional career in 1983 at the Institute for
Communication Engineering at RWTH, Aachen. In 1988 February he received a Ph. D. in
electrical engineering. In 1989 he joined HEAD acoustics Inc. in Aachen as vice president.
Since 1999 he is head of the HEAD acoustics telecom division.
He is mainly involved in acoustics, speech signal processing and its perceptual effects,
QOS & QOE topics, measurement technology and speech transmission quality.
He is active in ITU-T, ETSI, 3GPP, GCF, IEEE, TIA, CTIA, DKE and VDA and vice chair of
the ETSI technical committee STQ and chair of the ITU-T focus group CarCom.
He is author of more than 150 scientific papers and holds five patents. He is member of
ASA, IEEE, VDE and DEGA where he was chair of the “Speech Communication” committee
from 2003 until March 2009.
Prof. Hakkı Gökhan Ilk was born in Ankara, Turkey. He received the BSc. degree from
Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1993 as summa cum laude, M.Sc degree
instrument design and application and the Ph.D.degrees from UMIST and University of
Manchester, Manchester, U.K., in 1994 and 1997, respectively.
He is full professor and department chair in the Electrical and Electronics Engineering
Department, Ankara University. He is the founder of the Ankara University Speech
Processing Group (AUSPG). His current research interests are digital signal processing,
speech quality assesment, speech compression and coding in particular.
Prof. Ilk was the recipient of Ankara University’s sponsorship for his postgraduate studies in the U.K and
shared 1st place for “Best Academy Study”award from TURKCELL in 2007.
Dr. Jan Holub is an Associate Professor in the Department of Measurement of Faculty of
Electrical Engineering of Czech Technical University in Prague, the oldest technical
university in Europe (est. 1707). Dr. Holub is an internationally recognized expert in the
field of objective and subjective speech quality measurement, with more than 170
published academic papers in the field and related topics. Dr. Holub participates in
international standards activities (e.g. ETSI STF 294), manages the MESAQIN.com
company since 1999 and is frequently consulted by companies within the industry. His
research interests cover AD and DA converters, digital signal processing, speech coding
and processing, psychoacoustics and measurements in telecommunication networks.
Dr. Holub has acted as chair of organizing and member of program committees of
MESAQIN 2002-2012. He also acted as a chairman of the section Dithering in ISDDMI 98 (10th International
Symposium on Development in Digital Measuring Instrumentation, Naples, Faculty of Engineering) and was
awarded by Antoio Menchetti prize for the best contribution of younger scientist there. Member of Program
Committee of WTS 2006-2013 and Program Committee Chair of WTS 2009, Prague, Czech Republic.
Dr. Holub is an IMEKO member since 2004. He represents Czech Republic in IMEKO TC-1 since 2008 and has
become an IMEKO TC-1 chair in 2010. Currently he acts as a Program Committee Member of IMEKO World
Congress to be held in Busan, Korea in 2012. His other memberships include ISCA (2002), IET (prev. IEE,
2004) and ETSI STQ (European Telecommunication Standardization Institution, Speech Transmission
Quality).
Foto: Modl, München
Andreas Kamcke's current responsibilities are as Manager Standards & Regulation of
Gigaset Communications GmbH. In 1979, he graduated from the Technische Universität
Berlin with a Diplom-Ingenieur in Electrical Engineering. After graduation he spent five
years at Technische Universität Berlin working on a research project and on laboratory
courses dealing with electrical measurements. Since 1984 he is working on
telecommunications in the industry: Electro-acoustical measurements, ISDN Terminals,
Protocol Test Equipment, EMC, EMF, Broadband ISDN, SMS on PSTN and Harmonized
Standards. During 1998 to 2002 he was Rapporteur of ITU-T’s SG12 Terminal Question.
From 2001 to 2002 he was Vice-Chairman of ETSI TC ATA and in 2011 he became
Chairman of ETSI TC STQ.
Jean-Yves Le Saoût, France Telecom Jean-Yves Le Saoût started his professional career
at France Telecom in 1988. After 10 years of experience in radiofrequency domain (design
of antenna arrays, signal processing on real-time platform) he joined DIH/EQS laboratory
(Human Interactions / Evaluation and acceptability of Services Quality). Since 2000, his
main tasks are issues related to quality evaluation of voice services. In this context several
matters are addressed: Quality Monitoring with development of probes dedicated to QoS
monitoring of VoIP offers, Expertise with management of measurement campaigns to
assess end-to-end quality of voice services, Terminal Characterization with evaluation
performance of phone terminals in connection with standardization. He performs these
different actions as Senior Expert.
Engineer in Electronics (I.N.S.A. Rennes), he received in 1989 his Ph. D. from Rennes University in Signal
processing and Telecommunications.
He is active in standardization groups since 2001 and in particular in ETSI Technical Committee STQ where
he participated and contributed since 2003. Recently he became Vice-Chair of TC STQ.
Dr. Miroslaw Narbutt received MSc in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering
from Poznan University of Technology (Poland) and PhD in Computer Science from
University College Dublin. His postdoctoral research in Dublin Institute of Technology
(DIT) was focused on quality of service provisioning for real-time VoIP transmission in
both wired and wireless networks. He actively contributed to the work of standardization
bodies such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI-STQ) and the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T SG12). His method of predicting voice
transmission quality from time varying transmission impairments was adopted by the
ITU-T as Appendix I to the ITU-T G.109 Recommendation. Real-time implementation of
this method resulted in a subsequent international patent application filling (WO
2011/073217 A1) and a technology (EQUAL+) that can improve the quality of VoIP calls. Miroslaw Narbutt
was awarded the DIT "Best
Researcher Invention Award" in 2008 and the "Researcher Commercialization Award" in 2009 from the Irish
government Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation. Since 2009, he has continued to be involved
with the DIT as a freelance consultant advising on the commercialization on the EQUAL+ technology.
Maty NDIAYE received the Dipl.-Ing. Degree in signal processing and
telecommunications from IFSIC ( since became ESIR), Rennes, France, and the Research
Master Degree with a major in electronics and telecommunications from the University of
Rennes 1, Rennes, France, 2011.
In october 2011, she joined Orange Labs, the R&D department of France Telecom, as a
Research Engineer/Ph.D. Student. Her work mainly concerns the Qos & Qoe correlation for
interactive services linked to pictures such as videoconferencing, over LTE/4G mobile
network
Joachim Pomy, Telecommunications & Int’l Standards
Joachim received his Diploma in Communications Engineering from Darmstadt Technical
University in 1984. The same year he joined Telefonbau & Normalzeit in Frankfurt where he
became responsible for PABX transmission planning, and approval, for mouth-to-ear voice
quality and for perceptual evaluation of users' satisfaction.
Since 1988 he is actively involved in related standardization efforts in ITU-T, ETSI,
MESAQIN, BITKOM, TIA, T1A1 and IEEE. In 2002 Joachim was awarded the ETSI internal
Service Medal for his achievements with the Asia-Pacific-Telecommunity (APT).
In 2008 Joachim left his position in Frankfurt and started to work as a Freelance Consultant
in Telecommunications & International Standards. He completed successfully ITU projects on QoS in Nepal,
the Maldives and for Afghanistan; he gave QOS/QoE workshop presentations e.g. in Spain, Kenya, the
Maldives, Lebanon and South-Korea.
Currently, Joachim is leader of the an ETSI project on Adaptation of the ETSI QoS Model to better consider
results from field testing. Joachim has taken responsibility and leadership in ETSI STQ and ITU-T SG12 for
more than one decade.
Together with researchers from OPTICOM, Swissqual and TNO he supported actively the standardization
process of P.863 (POLQA, Perceptual Objective Listening Quality Assessment) by acting as the appointed
editor of P.863 until its publication and now as a co-editor for the Application Guide to P.863.
Joachim is vice chair of ETSI STQ and (co-) rapporteur for multiple areas in ITU and ETSI; he is also the (co) author of more than 150 contributions to ITU, ETSI and TIA.
Peter Počta was born in 1981, in Nové Zámky, Slovakia. He received his M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees from University of Žilina, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Slovakia in 2004 and
2007, respectively. During his Ph.D. study, he was awarded a number of fellowships.
Firstly, he spent 3 months as an Erasmus student in the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Information Technology, Chair of Telecommunications at Dresdner
University of Technology, Germany where he collaborated on testing principles over ADSL
access lines. Secondly, he was with Alcatel-Lucent, R&D center, Network Integration
department, Stuttgart, Germany where he investigated some impacts on speech quality in
WiMAX system. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunications and
Multimedia at University of Žilina and is involved with International Standardization through the ETSI STQ as
well as ITU-T SG12 working group. His research interests include speech and video quality assessment,
VoIP, VoWLAN and cross-layer optimization. He has published over 20 refereed papers in international
journals and conferences including the Acta Acustica united with Acustica, Advances in Multimedia (Hindawi),
AEÜ - International Journal of Electronics and Communications (Elsevier) and MESAQIN. He also serves as
external reviewer for the Journal of Systems and Software (Elsevier), Computer Standards & Interfaces
(Elsevier) and the Mediterranean Journal of Electronics and Communications (SoftMotor) and several
conferences in area of speech quality and communication networks.
Raimund Schatz is Senior Researcher at the Telecommunications Research Center
Vienna (FTW) in the Area of “User-centered Interaction and Communication Economics”.
He holds an Msc. in Telematics (TU-Graz), a PhD in Informatics (TU-Vienna), an MBA
(Open University, UK) and an MSc. in International and Finance Management (Open
University, UK).
Dr. Schatz leads FTW’s research projects (GRACE, ACE, ACE 2.0, ACE 3) on Quality-ofExperience assessment and monitoring of broadband services in wireless and wireline
networks. Furthermore, he is actively involved in QoE-related EU projects, including
Optiband (FP 7) and QuEEN (Celtic) as well as the COST Actions IC0703 (Data Traffic
Monitoring and Analysis) and IC1003 (European Network on Quality of Experience in Multimedia Systems
and Services). Being an active member of ACM and IEEE, he has more than 50 publications in the areas of
Quality of Experience, HCI and Pervasive Computing.
Alexander Raake is an Assistant Professor heading the group Assessment of IP-based
Applications at Telekom Innovation Laboratories (T-Labs), Technische Universität (TU)
Berlin. From 2005 to 2009, he was a senior scientist at the Quality & Usability Lab of T-Labs,
TU Berlin. From 2004 to 2005, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at LIMSI-CNRS in Orsay,
France. From the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, he obtained his doctoral degree (Dr.-Ing.) in
January 2005, with a book on the speech quality of VoIP (extended version appeared as
Speech Quality of VoIP, Wiley, 2006). After his graduation in 1997, he took up research at
EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland on ferroelectric thin films. Before, he studied Electrical
Engineering in Aachen (RWTH) and Paris (ENST/Télécom). His research interests are in speech, audio and
video processing and transmission, Quality of Experience assessment, audiovisual and multimedia services
and user perception modeling. Since 1999, he has been involved in the standardization activities of the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) on transmission performance of telephone networks and
terminals, where he currently acts as a Co-Rapporteur for question Q.14/12 on audiovisual quality models,
and is co-editor of several standard recommendations. He has been awarded with a number of prices for his
research, such as the Johann-Philipp-Reis-Preis in 2011.
Volker Sypli was born in 1968. He studied communication engineering at the University of
Applied Science in Dieburg, Germany, involving a 5 month stay at a partnership project on
speech encoding at the École Nouvelle en Communication in Lille, France.
After his graduation in 1994 he worked at the Federal Office for Posts and
Telecommunications in Mainz, Germany, on type approvals for voice telephony services and
analogue access lines as well as interconnection of fixed telephone networks and Open
Network Provision.
The Federal Office has been transferred to the Federal Network Authority (National
Regulatory Authority), where Volker Sypli worked on technical matters of the standardization and regulation
of Interconnection issues, Quality of Service and Universal Services. During work on standardization he took
part in the work of ITU-T Study Group 2 and 12 (Rapporteur of Question 10/12) as well as within ETSI
TC/STQ, STQ Mobile and User Group. He was also concerned with technical aspects of the implementation of
Lawful Interception for voice and data services and Data Retention provisions.
Currently he is working within the section Internet Econocmics of the Regulatory Authority dealing with
technical issues of IP and VoIP interconnection, QoS aspects in packet switched networks and next
generation access (NGA). He is editor within the BEREC working group on QoS within the scope of Net
Neutrality.
His focus is on the development of concepts for end-user QoS measurement and transparency aspects,
architectural design of IP networks, access network infrastructures and implementation of end user services
(Over The Top applications).
Michal Soloducha was born in 1984 in Wroclaw in Poland. In 2008 he was granted the
degree of Master of Science Engineer in the field of Electronics &Telecommunications
majoring in Multimedia and Consumer Electronics at the Poznan University of Technology
(PL). In 2010 he was awarded Bachelor degree in the field of Acoustics with major in Audio
Engineering at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (PL). Between 2009 and 2011 he
was research assistant in the project “Quality of Public Life Determined by Good Hearing
and Speech Communication” financed by Polish-Norway Research Found where did
research about the impact of the acoustic properties of public premises in speech
intelligibility. In the years 2008-2011 he also worked in a design office where he was
designing telecommunication networks and junctions. He joined the Telekom Innovation Laboratories and
AIPA research team in 2012 as a research assistant and PhD student. His research topic is speech quality
assessment and monitoring.
Dr. Imre Varga received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. (summa cum laude) degrees and worked in
university area on network and filter theory, sigma-delta modulators, and adaptive
filtering with applications for telecommunications. He was responsible for the development
of signal processing algorithms for professional audio at Barco-EMT in Germany. He
worked for Thomson Multimedia Corporate Research as project leader and technical
advisor for multimedia communication, speech coding, audio processing, command-andcontrol and NLP-based dialogue systems. He joined Siemens AG in 1997 as R&D lab
manager of signal processing activities for mobile telephony, later he became head of
Multimedia R&D Department, with focus on speech and multimedia applications. Early
2009 he joined Qualcomm Inc. working on speech coding and related standardization.
Dr. Varga participates in standardization groups for speech coding and multimedia applications in ITU-T
SG16 and SG12, 3GPP. He serves as Director in the Board of IMTC, he is author of a number of technical
papers and a Senior Member of the IEEE.
Ruth Wilson joined DSP Group in 2002 and is responsible for sales & marketing
activities in Europe. Since early 2006, Ruth has held the position of the Deputy-Chair of
the DECT Forum Board and also Chair of the Marketing WG, whilst actively contributes to
other key industry fora such as the HGI.
Particular focus has been with development of the DECT/CAT-iq market and integration
into the IP network, the roll-out of HD voice and the use of ULE technology in the
Connected Home, and is currently acting chair of the ULE Working Group.
Ruth has over 25 years experience in the electronics industry, having a background in
embedded software engineering and product realization
in a variety of market sectors prior to focusing on the wireless semiconductor market
and holds a BSC (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh.