John Apostolopoulos

John Apostolopoulos is VP & CTO of Cisco’s Intent Based Networking Group (IBNG), which is Cisco’s largest business covering enterprise networking, data center networking, and Internet of Things (IoT). As CTO he drives the technology and architecture direction in strategic areas for the business. Towards these goals he works closely with groups across Cisco, and partners, customers, academia, and standardization organizations.

He also founded Cisco’s Innovation Labs, whose mission is to drive technology innovation aligned with Cisco’s strategic directions. This covers the broad Cisco portfolio including Intent-Based Networking (IBN), Internet of Things, wireless (ranging from Wi-Fi, OpenRoaming, 5G for enterprise use cases, private 5G), cloud networking, application-aware networking, multimedia networking, indoor-location-based services, connected car, trustworthy systems, machine learning and AI applied to the aforementioned areas, and deep learning for visual analytics.

Previously, John was at HP Labs from 1997 to 2012 where he was a Distinguished Technologist and then Lab Director for the Mobile & Immersive Experience Lab at HP Labs. The MIX Lab’s goal was to create compelling networked media experiences that fundamentally change how people communicate, collaborate, socialize and entertain. The MIX Lab conducted research on novel mobile devices and sensing, mobile client/cloud multimedia computing, immersive environments, video & audio signal processing, computer vision & graphics, multimedia networking, glasses-free 3D, next-generation plastic displays, wireless, and user experience design. His personal technical work includes mobile and immersive communication systems, innovative mobile device capabilities & experiences, networked media, multimedia client/cloud computing, robust & secure video communication, and mobile streaming media content delivery networks for all-IP (4G) wireless networks. John also had exciting internships at Jet Propulsion Laboratory on deep-space optical communication and at AT&T Bell Labs on very-low-bit-rate video communication.

John has received a number of honors and awards including IEEE Fellow, IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer, named “one of the world’s top 100 young (under 35) innovators in science and technology” (TR100) by MIT Technology Review, received a Certificate of Honor for contributing to the US Digital TV Standard (Engineering Emmy Award 1997), and his work on media transcoding in the middle of a network while preserving end-to-end security (secure transcoding) was adopted in the JPSEC standard. He has published over 100 papers, including receiving 5 best paper awards, and has about 90 granted US patents. John also has strong collaborations with the academic community and was a Consulting Associate Professor of EE at Stanford (2000-09), and frequently lecturers at MIT. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in EECS from MIT.