As a number of recent events have reminded us, Emergency and Crisis Management is quite a hot topic of R&D and Wireless Communications are at the core of Emergency and Crisis Management. This Panel will cover a number of International Initiatives in this area (MESA, EMTEL and CAP), present the achievements of a number of International Projects in this area (WIDENS and CAPANINA) and introduce a number of relevant Technologies (HAPS, Gateways).

Biography: Patrick J. Gannon is President and Chief Executive Officer of OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards); an international not-for-profit non-governmental organization (NGO) whose mission is to drive the development, convergence and adoption of e-business standards.
Mr. Gannon has served on the OASIS Board of Directors since July 2000. From 2000 to 2006 Mr Gannon pioneered the Internet Enterprise Development project with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, serving as Chair of the Team of Specialists to assist less-advantaged countries to participate in internet-based international trade. In June 2006 he was appointed as a high-level Advisor to the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN GAID).
He was previously Senior Vice President of BEA Systems, a major enterprise infrastructure software company, where he was responsible for Strategic Marketing in the eCommerce Integration Division. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Marketing and Industry Programs at Netfish Technologies in California and previously Vice President of Strategic Programs at CommerceNet Consortium, directing research and development efforts in new internet commerce standards, including Extensible Mark-up Language (XML). At CommerceNet, he expanded research into interoperable catalogs in 1996, and in 1998 was the first Project Leader for RosettaNet, which is a consortium working to achieve globally networked supply chains and also served as Executive Director for the Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) project.
Mr. Gannon has provided consultation to governmental leaders (ministers and heads of state) on adoption of electronic business strategies to facilitate economic growth and support their eGovernment implementations. He was educated at Georgia Institute of Technology, and has co-authored the book, Building Database-Driven Web Catalogs. Mr Gannon is an experienced speaker and chair at many international conferences on electronic business and standards for the Internet. He participated at the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) 2003 in Geneva and in Tunis in 2005.

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Biography: Shah Talukder has been a seasoned business leader for over 22 years in the areas of telecommunications, medical electronics, enterprise systems, and consulting. Talukder is General Manager of the Safety, Security and Systems Business Unit at Cisco. He started his career as a systems design engineer at a digital PBX start-up in 1983. He then spent 6 years at Phillips Medical Research Ultrasound Division holding positions with increasing scope and responsibility, in the areas of design and development, marketing, and product management for ultrasound imaging and servo control. Talukder moved rapidly into leadership and management positions in sales and marketing, after his MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management in 1994, in various companies including Gemini Strategy Consulting (Telecommunications Group), Sun Microsystems, and Cisco. In addition, Shah founded E-SchoolNet and Zayant Inc. (IEEE 1394 start-up), which was acquired by Apple Computers.
In 2000, Talukder moved to Cisco Systems as the Director of Marketing for Long-Reach Ethernet. In this role, he defined the vision, strategy, and business models for enabling the in-building broadband market and successfully launched LRE into strategic accounts such as Starwood Hotels and Sprint. He also developed ecosystem and channel partners to complement Cisco products and solutions.
Starting in 2002, Talukder has passionately worked on addressing the mobility and communications interoperability problems in many verticals, especially Public Safety and Transportation. He built a “start-up” team within Cisco that developed the vision, strategy, and road map for Cisco IPICS and formed the Safety, Security and Systems Business Unit (S3BU) dedicated to address the communications interoperability in enterprise operations, safety/security, and emergency management.
Talukder has a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and an MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University.

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Biography: Dr David Grace received his MEng degree in Electronic Systems Engineering and D.Phil degree from the University of York, UK in 1993 and 1999 respectively. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of York, and the Principal Scientific Officer of the FP6 CAPANINA project, which is investigating aerial platform broadband communications delivery to both fixed and high-speed vehicle users. Current research interests include cognitive radio for broadband communications, particularly from high-altitude platform and terrestrial ad hoc networks. He is an author of over 100 journal and conference publications, many in the field of HAP communications. He is also a Director of SkyLARC Technologies Ltd, a spin-off company from the University of York that specialises in providing expertise and solutions for the delivery of broadband communications from aerial platforms. He is WG1 chair of COST 297 that deals with radio communications aspects of HAP systems. He is a nominated Researcher in the European NEWCOM Network of Excellence and member of the IEEE Satellite and Space Technical Committee.

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Biography: Adrian Boukalov received M.Sc degree in radio engineering from St. Petersburg Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute, Radio System department. 1984. Next 5 years he spent in industry being involved in several R&D projects. Later he has been a managing director of private company. Since 1998 he has been with Communications Laboratory of HUT. His research interests include system aspects of public safety radio communications, spatial processing, radio network planning and performance. He is responsible for research team that is working in these areas at HUT. In 2000-2001 he had been a principal investigator of the international co-operation project between HUT and Stanford University (USA) and had been a visiting scientist at Smart Antennas Research Group (SARG) at Stanford University. In 2002 Adrian became an elected chairman of the Technical Specification Group System (TSG SYS) of the transatlantic project MESA. His management responsibilities in MESA included co-ordination of MESA work on system concept definition and technology development, co-ordination of different international research initiatives related to MESA. Adrian is involved EU projects -WIDENS, DeHiGate, CHORIST, u2010 in the area of public safety communication systems. Since 2005 Adrian is a Vice Chairman of SC EMTEL at ETSI.

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Biography: Erik Fernández Santos received the Telecommunications Engineer from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 1995. In 1995, he worked for Indra (a spanish technological company) before joining in 1996 the Telecommunication Traffic Department of Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo. He has participated in many Telefonica´s internal projects within the Performance Analysis Group. In 2000, he moved to Brazil working for the International Data Warehouse Systems Department, as Project Leader of a core Data Warehouse for Telefonica in Sao Paulo. From 2002, he has been working in several Data Marts and Data Warehouses for Telefónica Group in Spain. Within the WIDENS European FP6 project, he has been working in the application & demonstration workpackage, mainly focused in the database application. This Demonstration Workpackage included integration of other packages and showed the potential of this new network in the field trials. Currently, he is working in CELTIC´s project DeHiGate.