Speakers CHI-NOG 13

Tom Kacprzynski is the co-founder and Program Committee Chair of the Chicago Network Operators Group (CHI-NOG), which he helped establish in 2013 to foster community and knowledge exchange among network engineers across the Midwest. By day, Tom is a Sr. Manager of Network Engineering at Akamai Technologies, leading the team responsible for Akamai’s global backbone. Over his 20+ year career he has architected networks for Meta, Oracle, Rackspace, and Ericsson Edge Gravity. He holds a CCIE certification and also serves on the NANOG Program Committee.

Jeff Doyle specializes in IP routing protocols, complex BGP policy, data center fabrics and AI/ML infrastructure, network automation systems, EVPN/VxLAN, MPLS, and IPv6. He has designed large-scale service provider networks in 26 countries over 6 continents, and is the author of CCIE Professional Development: Routing TCP/IP; OSPF and IS-IS; Intent-Based Networking for Dummies; and co-author of Network Programmability and Automation Fundamentals. He is co-host of the livestream show Between 0x2 Nerds and one of the founders of the IPv6 Forum.

Tyler Conrad is a Principal Engineer for Arista based out of Austin, TX, where he designs and optimizes a wide variety of networks. With a 15-year career in the networking space — half as a customer and half as a vendor — he is a self-proclaimed hat collector across the networking and security landscapes. A former expat to Mexico and speaker of several languages, Tyler balances technical rigor with rock climbing, mountain biking, and amateur electrical work.

Mike has served as an IETF PIM Working Chair for over 20 years. He’s an IP routing research and standards expert developing the architectures of next generation networks. He leads SRv6, multicast and distributed ledger projects. He’s worked for Apple, Cisco, Huawei, Ericsson and Futurewei over his career and has spoken at events around the world including CHI-NOG and NANOG.

Colby Barth is a Senior Distinguished Technologist at HPE, working in the JunOS Routing Protocols Development team with an emphasis on protocol agnostic Traffic Engineering applications. Colby has authored several RFCs, Internet drafts, books, and over 35 patents to date. He has over 25 years of experience designing, building, and operating IP/MPLS networks.

Scott Robohn is co-founder and CEO of Solutional, where he leads consulting, training, and technical marketing in next-gen networking, automation, and AI. With 35+ years of experience, Scott helps IT organizations evolve into software-centric, resilient, and intelligent network operations. Scott is a frequent event speaker, a co-founder of the Network Automation Forum (NAF), and host of the Total Network Operations podcast.

Bryton Herdes is a Principal Network Engineer at Cloudflare with a role split between both the edge and backbone global network. Prior to Cloudflare, he worked primarily in the ISP networking space, helping bring fiber and wireless connectivity to rural parts of the United States. Bryton mostly spends his time at Cloudflare working on network design, implementation, and fighting fires.

Distinguished Engineer at Cisco with approximately 9 years at Cisco and the previous 20+ years working with service providers. Past speaking experience includes NANOG (3x) and many other conferences such as OFC, Peering Days, and Cisco Live. Outside of his day job he enjoys cycling, amateur auto racing, and tinkering with electronics.

Joaquin Chung is a research scientist at the Data Science and Learning Division, Argonne National Laboratory. His main work focuses on studying architectures for scalable quantum networks through both testbeds and simulations. He also has expertise in designing systems for memory-to-memory data streaming between federated scientific instruments and software-defined networking. He received his Ph.D from Georgia Institute of Technology and is a Fulbright alumnus, IEEE senior member, and ACM member.

Aaron is a Chicagoland-born network engineer who has spent the past decade building internet infrastructure. A DePaul University alumnus, he is currently a Senior Network Engineer at CoreWeave, building out network infrastructure for AI. Before CoreWeave, he spent 8 years at Akamai Technologies on the edge and backbone teams. Aaron previously served on the NANOG Program Committee (2020–2024) and Hackathon Committee (2020–2026).

Steve Ulrich is a networking engineer specializing in data center infrastructure, AI networking, and service provider technologies. He is currently at nexthop.ai, focused on network infrastructure and platform development for hyperscalers. Previously he held engineering roles at Arista Networks, Juniper Networks, and Cisco Systems. Within NANOG, he serves on the board of directors as well as the workshop and hackathon committees.

Taran Deshpande is a Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco specializing in virtual routing. He spends his time designing hands-on labs and workshops that help network engineers get practical experience with virtualized routing platforms. Taran has previously presented at Cisco Live and CHI-NOG.

Rob Martin is the Manager of Advisory Systems Engineering at Arista Networks, where he leads a team of engineers focused on architecting resilient, next-generation network solutions. Throughout his career in both enterprise and vendor environments, Rob has focused on the evolution of network operations from manual CLI tasks to automated ecosystems, having moved from a hands-on “designated scripter” to a leadership role.

Matt Griswold builds Internet infrastructure, with a focus on automation, interconnection, and operational tooling. Over the past two decades, he has founded and led community-focused initiatives including United IX (Chicago Internet Exchange), FullCtl, and Open Pipes. Matt was a founding board member of PeeringDB and serves as president of the Global Peering Forum (GPF). Through his company 20C, Matt teaches robots to create software.

Nick has been involved in networking since 1997, primarily focused on service provider networking and large scale, high performance networking. He held various roles designing and building the International Supercomputing Conference network (SCinet) from 2003 to 2023. Nick works as part of the ESNet Planning and Architecture group and leads the implementation and community of practice for the IPv6-only mandate at the US Department of Energy.

Dr. Deepak Kakadia is Founder and CEO of NetAI, a Silicon Valley company advancing autonomous network operations through AI. With over 20 years in enterprise and service provider networking, including eight years at Google, he combines deep domain expertise with innovation in Graph Neural Networks for deterministic root cause analysis. A PhD, inventor with numerous patents, and recognized industry speaker.

David Huberman joined ICANN in 2018. He has been in the internet engineering industry since 1999. Prior to joining ICANN, he was at companies such as Microsoft, Global Crossing, Oracle, and Telocity. He also spent 10 years at ARIN. David graduated from Indiana University in 1996.

Brad Gorman is the Director of Customer Technical Services at ARIN and is the community resource for Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), Internet Routing Registries (IRRs), and other topics impacting routing security. He has worked in the Internet community since the mid-1990s, at service providers like America Online, Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications, and also spent three years as the peering coordinator for Verisign.

Eddy has over 30 years experience in systems and network engineering with a technical focus primarily in DNS, DHCP and network management. Eddy has led and consulted on several large scale DNS/DNSSEC deployments and transitions. He has given trainings and lectures around the globe on DHCP and DNS/BIND. He is a frequent attendee and speaker at NANOG, APRICOT and LISA.

Mohammad Zaman is an SDN and New Product Engineer at Nokia with over a decade of experience in IP networking, data center design, and network programmability. His work focuses on building and validating high-performance AI infrastructure and large-scale GPU clusters used for distributed training and benchmarking. He has deep expertise in RoCEv2, RDMA, ECN/PFC based congestion management, and correlating network performance with AI training efficiency.

Amer Fakhar is Principal Solutions Architect at Nokia focused on hyperscale and next-generation cloud networking. He specializes in designing and deploying high-performance data center fabrics and DC-Interconnects for hyperscalers with a strong emphasis on AI/ML infrastructure. He brings over two decades of experience across trading firms, network vendors, utilities, and enterprise environments.