Team Profile

Dr. Biswajit Nandy

Chief Technology Officer

Biswajit, a co-founder of Solana Networks, brings 15 years of experience in the area of data communication.  Dr. Nandy has been technical prime for the Canarie UCLPv2 programme and is actively involved in defining the architecture for Solana Networks implementation. He is also spearheading Solana Networks efforts on UCLPv2 interoperability.

In the past he has worked at Nortel Networks, Bell Northern Research, Tropic Networks and Belair Networks. The primary focus of his work has been in the area of IP networking protocols and architecture.  As an Independent Contributor at Nortel Networks, he spearheaded various advance technology programs and R&D projects in IP networking. He worked as a Network Architect with the MPLS team and as a member of the architecture team at Tropic Networks to address complex optical networking issues. He worked as a System Architect on WLAN mesh networking products at BelAir Networks.

Dr. Nandy has a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo and has been an Adjunct Research Professor with Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University since 2001. He holds an M.Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and a B.E. in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from Jadavpur University, Calcutta.  He has authored and presented over 25 research papers in International conferences and holds 10 US patents. He has actively participated in various Work Groups in IETF and author of several IETF proposals in the form of Internet Drafts and RFC.

Geraint Jones

Vice President Business Development

Geraint Jones is a co-founder of Solana Networks and has more than 20 years experience in business development, product marketing, and business management in the telecommunications industry.  Geraint is the Programme Manager for the Canarie UCLPv2 project and contributes to the development of the UCLPv2 system.

Prior to founding Solana Networks, Geraint was responsible for business development at JDS Uniphase’s component business unit.  Geraint also served the Director of Product Line Management for JDS Uniphase and was responsible for the highly successful components business.  He successfully managed a team of product line managers and application engineers for the components business and was responsible or product with revenues of more that $200Million per quarter. 

Geraint has a BSc. in Physics and a MSc. in Microwaves and Optoelectronics from University College London.

Don Bennett

Senior Software Developer

Don Bennett has worked as a Software Engineer and Developer for nine years. His areas of expertise include database modeling, web services and web-enabled applications, Service Orientated Architecture, distributed and networked applications, and network protocols.

Don is a key member of the Solana Networks team that is developing Solana’s UCLPv2 implementation for Canarie.  He is involved in architecture design and the implementation and development the UCLPv2 implementation.  Don is the lead member of the Solana interoperability.

In the past, Don has worked extensively with optical systems with large companies, such as Nortel Networks, and start-up companies, such as Tropic Networks. During his time with Nortel, he has worked with groups including OpenIP, Magellan, and Test Engineering. Among other tasks at Nortel, he developed router software and a web-based database system for production floor environments. At Tropic he has was involved in the areas of MPLS and OSPF.

Don has a B. Eng., Computer Engineering from the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Rupinder Makkar

Senior Software Developer

Rupinder Makkar has 6 years experience in software development for networking applications as well as large complex systems. Rupinder is one of the key developers for Solana working on the UCLPv2 implementation for Canarie.  He is involved in the design, implementation and user interface for the UCLPv2.

While at Nortel Networks, he worked on the software development team that designed and implemented a next-generation Terabit Router (Optera Packet Core). As a Research Associate with Carleton University, Rupinder worked on software development for wireless LAN and optical routing systems.  He has worked in the Solana Networks/Sombra Labs team that developed a secure, distributed, scalable Internet-based Emergency Public Alerting System for Industry Canada. Rupinder has a thorough understanding of network protocols/operations and SSL based secure Internet communication.

Rupinder has a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Carleton University and an undergraduate degree in Electronics from Punjab University, Chandigarh, India

Bo Zhao

Software Developer

Bo Zhao has over 5 years experience in IT field. His areas of expertise include Client/Server development, database modeling, Web services, XML and AJAX.  He is involved in the design, implementation and switch interface for the UCLPv2.

As a Research Associate with University of Ottawa, Bo worked on software development for online Resources Management system. Bo has an extensive understanding of Web services, XML and related XML standards.

Bo Zhao has a Master's degree in System Science from University of Ottawa and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the Central University for Nationalities, Beijing, China.

Sabeel Ansari

Software Developer and Test

Sabeel Ansari is currently working as a software engineer at Solana Networks.  Prior to Solana Networks, he worked as a system engineer at a startup in Montreal named CanInd. His areas of expertise include networking protocols, wireless networks and operating systems.  Sabeel is responsible for the development and testing of Solana Networks’ implementation of UCLPv2.

He has a Masters in Computer Science degree from Concordia University, Montreal. He holds a Bachelor in Engineering degree from Visveswaraiah Technological University, India. He has authored about 5 research papers in reputed international conferences/magazines.

Dr, Shikharesh Majumdar

Senior Researcher

Shikharesh Majumdar is a Professor and the Director of the Real Time and Distributed Systems lab at the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He holds an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. degree in Computational Science from University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. Before his graduate studies in Canada he did a Bachelor of Electronics and Telecom Engineering and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Computer Science (Hardware) from Jadavpur University in India and completed the Corso Di Perfezionamento in Electrotechniques (Communication) from Politecnico Di Torino in Italy. Dr. Majumdar had worked at the R&D Wing of Indian Telephone Industries (Bangalore) for six years.

Dr. Majumdar has been doing research for the last 17 years on operating systems, middleware and performance issues in the context of parallel and distributed systems. He teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in these areas. His current research interests are in the areas of Grid-based systems, resource management, high performance web-based and telecommunication systems. One of his current research projects concerns resource management on Grids focusing on scheduling of resources to Grid applications. Particular attention is being paid to the co-scheduling of resources (computing, storage and communications resources for examples) to multiple competing applications. In another project, Dr. Majumdar and his team are devising effective strategies for the management of clusters of call servers (providing high scalability and geographic redundancy) that are used for call switching on telecommunication switches. A new project that concerns the deployment of web services on an intelligent network is currently underway. Dr. Majumdar actively collaborates with the industrial sector and is currently involved in two research projects with Nortel and one with Alcatel.

Dr. Majumdar has been actively researching distributed and real time systems and has made significant contributions to the state of the art in the domains of resource management and middleware. These include his pioneering work in scheduling on multiprogrammed parallel systems and his research on high performance middleware for inter-operable distributed object computing systems. He has authored over 75 papers, two of which have received awards in international IEEE conferences. He has served in the program committee of a number of conferences and has been the co-chair of the program committee of an international symposium and of an international workshop. Dr. Majumdar is a member of ACM and IEEE. He was a Distinguished Visitor for the IEEE Computer Society from 1998 to 2001.

Imran Ahmad

Researcher

Imran Ahmad is currently a PhD candidate, conducting his research at Carleton University. He has a work experience of nearly ten years in Software/telecommunication industry and was a key player in many successful projects. His specialization is in the field of distributed computing; especially grid computing, Micorosft .NET, Java EJBs and CORBA.

His current PhD thesis is about providing a solution to Neutrino Observatory in Sudbury in delivering and processing huge about of scientific data over a distributed network using grid computing. Imran has worked as a team leader in various software development projects.  Most recently he worked at Techlogix, Pakistan, which is working as an offshore development centre for General Electric Aero division. Imran also has a working experience of over five year with various hi-tech firms in Ottawa, including Mitel, Atmos and Silicon Access Networks.