IEEE 4th World Forum on Internet of Things
05-08 February 2018 – Singapore

Plenary/Keynote Speakers

Dr. Yaacob Ibrahim, Plenary Speaker at WF-IoT 2018

Dr Yaacob Ibrahim is the Minister for Communications & Information, the Minister in charge of Muslim Affairs and the Minister in charge of Cyber Security, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore.

He was a structural engineer at Bylander Meinhardt Partnership before receiving a scholarship to pursue a PhD at Stanford University (US). He then worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Cornell University (US) before joining the National University of Singapore. He is currently on leave of absence from the university as an associate professor.

Dr Yaacob has been active in community service since his school days and has been involved in the Association of Muslim Professionals, Jamiyah, Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura and the Nature Society (Singapore). Dr Yaacob also served as a board member of the Civil Service College, the National Heritage Board, STV12 Pte Ltd, and Temasek Polytechnic, and as a trustee of NTUC Income, a union-linked cooperative. He has been associated with Yayasan Mendaki since its formation and has been its Chairman since March 2002.

Dr Yaacob has been a Member of Parliament (MP) since 1997. He served as the MP for Jalan Besar Group Representation Constituency (GRC) from 1997 to 2011 and Moulmein-Kallang GRC from 2011 to 2015. He is currently the MP for Jalan Besar GRC (Kolam Ayer). He was also the first Mayor of Central Singapore District from April to November 2001.

Dr Yaacob served as Parliamentary Secretary and Senior Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology before he was appointed the Minister of State for Community Development and Sports in November 2001. In March 2002, he was appointed as the Ministry’s Acting Minister and Minister-In-Charge of Muslim Affairs. In May the following year, he was promoted to Minister for Community Development and Sports.

In August 2004, Dr Yaacob was appointed Minister for the Environment and Water Resources. He was re-appointed in the same capacity following the May 2006 elections. Following the May 2011 elections, he was appointed Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts. In November 2012, with the restructuring of ministries, Dr Yaacob became the Minister for Communications and Information. He was appointed the Minister in charge of Cyber Security in April 2015. He has been re-appointed as the Minister for Communications and Information following the September 2015 elections. He continues to be in charge of Muslim affairs and cyber security.

Dr Yaacob serves in the People’s Action Party’s Central Executive Committee as its vice-chairman.

Dr Yaacob was born in Singapore on 3 October 1955. He is married and has two children: a son and a daughter. He enjoys reading, listening to music, and meeting people.

Tim Hahn, Plenary Speaker at WF-IoT 2018

Tim Hahn is a IBM Distinguished Engineer and has been with IBM since 1990. He is the Chief Architect for Internet of Things Security within the IBM Watson Internet of Things division. He is responsible for strategy, architecture, and design for IBM Watson Internet of Things offerings. These offerings, coupled with others from across IBM, enable customers to design, build, experiment, run, manage, and operate solutions involving diverse sensor data coming from connected devices. These solutions leverage IBM’s strengths in cloud, cognitive, analytics, mobile, social, and security.

Maciej Kranz – Plenary Speaker at WF-IOT 2018

MACIEJ KRANZ is a business leader, frequent keynote speaker, and the author of the New York Times Best Seller, Building the Internet of Things. Kranz brings 30 years of computer networking experience to his current position as Vice President of the Corporate Strategic Innovation Group at Cisco Systems. He leads the team focused on incubating new businesses, accelerating internal innovation, and driving co-innovation with customers, partners and startups through a global network of Cisco Innovation Centers. Prior to this role, he was general manager of Cisco’s Connected Industries Group, where he drove the Internet of Things (IoT) business for key industrial markets. In his book, Building the Internet of Things, Kranz cuts through the hype to provide the first practical guide for business decision-makers on how to start their IoT journey. The book provides all the ingredients for IoT transformation, including case studies, step-by-step plans, fast paths to payback, cultural changes, standards, security, and much more.

Jan Rabaey – Plenary Speaker at WF-IOT 2018

JAN RABAEY holds the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a founding director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) and the Berkeley Ubiquitous SwarmLab, and is currently the Electrical Engineering Division Chair at Berkeley.

Prof. Rabaey has made high-impact contributions to a number of fields, including advanced wireless systems, low power integrated circuits, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing.  His current interests include the conception of the next-generation integrated wireless systems over a broad range of applications, as well as exploring the interaction between the cyber and the biological world.

He is the recipient of major awards, amongst which the IEEE Mac Van Valkenburg Award, the European Design Automation Association (EDAA) Lifetime Achievement award, and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) University Researcher Award. He is an IEEE Fellow, a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium, and has received honoray doctorates from Lund (Sweden), Antwerp (Belgium) and Tampere (Finland).  He has been involved in a broad variety of start-up ventures.

Presentation: IoT++ – The Living Network of Everyone and Everything

The Internet of Things (IoT) or Swarm vision, formulated more than 2 decades ago, presented a transformational model on how the physical and cyber worlds would be interlinked, enabled by a network of trillions of motor-sensory nodes distributed throughout our physical world. Many of the envisioned concepts are now truly happening, and are migrating into the consumer, commercial and industrial domain.

A new leap forward is about to happen. While the current incarnation of IoT is rather static, moving entities such as robots, drones, cars and UAVs are becoming more ubiquitous, forming networks that are far more dynamic. Even more, miniaturization of motor-sensory functions enables the Swarm to encompass the human body (“The Human Intranet”) opening the potential of true augmentation, and fundamentally changing how we humans interact with ourselves and with the world around us. The resulting networks of everyone and everything create entirely new options in so many areas such as human-machine interaction, augmented reality, tactile inter-networking, distributed manufacturing and smart cities.

Turning these opportunities into reality however poses challenges on so many fronts, some of which will be outlined in the presentation.

Bill Ruh – Plenary Speaker at WF-IOT 2018

Bill Ruh

BILL RUH is the CEO for GE Digital and Chief Digital Officer for GE. GE Digital provides premier digital software solutions and services through Predix, GE’s cloud-based platform for the Industrial Internet. GE Digital supports customers globally with a broad range of Industrial Internet applications, including asset performance management, operations optimization, brilliant manufacturing, platform-as-a-service, cloud and cybersecurity. Ruh’s focus is on building advanced software and analytics capabilities, and driving the global strategy, operations and portfolio of software services across all of GE’s businesses. He earned a bachelors and masters degree in Computer Science from California State University, Fullerton.