Candidate Biographies

The candidates for the RIPE PC election at RIPE 77 will each be giving a brief comment in support of their candidacy in the Main Room at 15:55. Do come along if you’d like to find out more.

• Alireza Vaziri
• Dimitry Burkov
• Igor Glinka
• Maria Isabel Gandia
• Matthijs Mekking
• Maximilian Wilhelm
• Samaneh Tajalizadehkhoob
• Stefan Wahl

 

Alireza Vaziri

Biography:

In 2003, I stepped into the Internet industry as the technical support of an ISP. It was around 2006 that I found my interest in networking and system engineering, so I went after a couple of vendor-specific certifications.

I have worked with different ISPs and organizations as a System/Network Administrator till 2016, and after that I went into information security. Back in those days, I found many ISPs in the Middle East region are facing Internet abuse, so botnets and DDoS caught my attention.

I have spoken at several conferences including RIPE and MENOG regarding the reduction of abuse in their network and I’m currently helping LIRs to reduce their network abuse and protect themselves. Unfortunately, inputs from my region are not sufficient and the number of contributions to the community is low compared to other service regions. I strongly believe that most of the issues could be addressed on RIPE meetings with the help of people from each region.

 

Dimitry Burkov

Biography:

I am interested in participating in RIPE Programme Committee work – I still have no such experience.

I have more than 35 years of experience in communications and IT, 25 years of management experience in data, voice communications and IT in the Internet/telecom industry and an extensive knowledge of Internet protocols and technologies.

I hope that my experience and network can provide something useful for our community.

 

Igor Glinka

Statement of Interest:

I’m an experienced lawyer, having gained experience in my country for last 15 years focusing on technology related issues. I have a law degree, a programming background and a classic mathematical education, giving me an opportunity to elaborate technology-friendly legal solutions on a daily basis.

I think it would be interesting for the RIPE community to have a closer look at topics where technology and legal matters are deeply interconnected. For example, when discussing cybersecurity, it is interesting after analysing defence mechanisms also to investigate such questions as eligibility of collection of data regarding attack and causing damage to other parties, including those which are not even suspected in any violations.

When discussing a problem of optimal routing we could remember of Net Neutrality, legal aspect of which appears to be much more relevant than technological.

Biography:

Igor studied Computer Science at the Moscow Aviation Institute and, after the postgraduate program, he worked as a cybernetics researcher in the Academy of Sciences. The Perestroika and Soviet Union collapse pulled Igor into the then-new Russia’s democratic structures as a representative in Moscow lawmaking institutions. When the revolutionary changes were over Igor went to Moscow State University and studied for a second degree, this time in law.

In 2002, he graduated as a lawyer and began to serve as a head in the Internet Development division of Moscow government, then he worked with various governments’ owned and private communication companies as legal advisor and Head of Legal department.

For the last five years, Igor has been at Voskhod, R&D – one of the main developers of Russia’s government information systems. He focuses on intellectual property rights, Internet governance, public procurement and so on. He brought Voskhod into RIPE NCC, although it required building a legal foundation for his government entity’s membership in a foreign organisation.

 

Maria Isabel Gandia

Statement of Interest:

I’ve been working as a network engineer at different levels and as a programme committee member or collaborator for several networking groups like ESNOG, SIG-NOC, RedIRIS or Euro-IX. For the last two years, I have also had the pleasure of working as a member of the RIPE Programme Committee and I would like to continue contributing to this task.

Biography:

Maria Isabel Gandia began working with networks in 1997. She began as a trainee at a non-profit organization called CESCA and evolved to become a Network Technician, a Network Expert, a Technical Leader and finally the Head of the Networking Unit at CSUC, the Consortium for University Services in Catalonia.

At CSUC, she manages the regional research and education network in Catalonia, Anella Científica and the Internet exchange, CATNIX.

On the world of research and education, she has participated as an organiser, speaker or program committee member in several Géant and RedIRIS task forces and working groups like SIG-NOC (Special Interest Group for Network Operation Centers). As far as Internet exchanges are concerned, she collaborates as part of the Benchmarking Club for the Euro-IX association. She is also an active member and an organizer of the ESNOG (Spanish Network Operators Group) meetings.

Her main topics of interest are network monitoring, BGP routing, DNS, IPv6, multicast and network operations improvement. She believes that initiatives like the RIPE Routing Information Service or RIPE Atlas benefit the whole world and the network engineers life in particular. This is why she has helped bring these and other distributed monitoring projects closer to the south of Europe.

One of her hobbies is helping artists to work with the network. She has helped organise multisite performances and master classes from Barcelona, and she has also participated in several editions of the Network and Performing Arts Production Workshop with collaborators from Internet2 and Géant, among other amazing people.

 

Matthijs Mekking

Statement of Interest:

I have participated in RIPE meetings frequently since 2008 with much joy. I would like to contribute to the meeting content and want to commit myself to keep the program relevant, diverse, and exciting. I like to believe that having worked in academics as well as in a commercial organization, my experience can have a great value to the program committee. I have some experience with the responsibilities that come with this role – in 2011, I was a PC member for the NLUUG meeting.

Biography:

I am a software engineer – my work projects include development of several open source DNS implementations (NSD, OpenDNSSEC, ldns, Unbound) and operations on commercial service and cloud platforms (Dyn, Oracle). I am involved in the IETF and have made contributions to several RFCs covering DNS, DNSSEC and IPv6. I have an academic background: I received a M.Sc. in Computer Science (2007) for my work on Shim6, an IPv6 extension header, and I have supervised several student projects.

 

Maximilian Wilhelm

Statement of Interest:

I’d like to serve the RIPE PC with a strong hands-on OPS background with knowledge about protocols and BCPs combined with an academic view on things.

Biography:

I’m an infrastructure architect at the university of Paderborn (Germany) with a focus on Linux, networking and storage, and an academic background. In my spare time I’m quite active in the free/open Wi-Fi initiative for some years now and try to enable as many people as possible to get Internet access and build low-cost service-provider-like backbone infrastructures.

For three years now, I’ve been part of the Freifunk Rheinland Backbone Operators team (AS201701) which serves as an Internet transit for many Freifunk communities in Germany.I’ve given some lectures about building networks/infrastructure in recent years and just recently organised a whole two day network track at the 13th Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) in Germany where I’m part of the programme committee, too.

Since the INOG meeting and RIPE Hackathon in Dublin this year, I’m a Co-Founder and active member of the Bio-Routing development team and have contributed parts of the eBGP/iBGP handling and route reflection support.