Muzaffer Akpinar
CEO, Turkcell

Together with the remarkable developments that we are seeing in globalization and technology, “communications” stands out as being one of the key concepts in today’s world. Telecommunications, including mobile communications, plays a critical part in this concept and has played an important role in the development of the “new economy”. Through new technology facilitating the transfer of large quantities of data, the increase in data communication applications and devices supporting advanced technology, the mobile communications market has a profound impact on all aspects of our lives. It is a market which reached a high level of penetration within a very short period of time and holds the potential to shape the future of a number of sectors including telecommunications, IT, media, banking, retail and logistics.

Muzaffer Akpinar will speak about his vision on the future of mobile communications and their impact on our society. Operating since 1994, Turkcell is among the major global mobile communications players with its innovative technological applications and investments in different countries, as well as being a bridge between the EU and emerging markets. Turkcell conducts all its activities with the vision of “simplifying and enriching the lives of its customers” and is among the leading companies in the GSM world with its infrastructure quality, wide coverage area both in Turkey and globally, reliable and qualitative services, customer relations channels and widespread sales network.

Born in 1962, Muzaffer Akpinar graduated from Saint Michel French High School and Boğaziçi University Faculty of Administrative Sciences. Having started his career as founder of Penta Textiles in 1986, he later served as CEO of KVK Mobile Phones Services in 1993, and as CEO of MV Holding. He played an active role in the incorporation process of Fintur Holding. He serves as CEO of Turkcell since January 2002. Mr. Akpinar is married with two children.

Maurizio Dècina
Professor, Politecnico di Milano

The Future of ICT Services

Prof. Dècina’s talk will focus on the future of information and communication technology (ICT) services delivered through distributed computing and networking platforms at multiple communication layers. He will describe the evolution of interoperable applications among such distributed systems towards the Semantic Web Services, and illustrate the rise of distributed networking at various layers. At the Internet Protocol (IP) layer the consensus on a full IP wired and wireless network architecture is enabled by the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which allows distributed session control for multimedia services and the integration of heterogeneous access networks. Above IP connectivity, overlay networks are rapidly becoming attractive to provide real-time services, such as telephony, in addition to a variety of applications: content-based delivery, peer-to-peer multimedia, XML routing and grid computing. On the other hand, distributed networking takes also place under the IP routing layer, with the spreading of wireless ad-hoc and wireless sensor networks. Peer-to-peer discovery and routing, security, reputation and anonymity are hot research issues common to underlay and overlay networking with respect to IP routing. The talk will also address some critical medium term issues in the competition for convergent services, such as fixed and mobile telephony, information, Internet and television services.

Maurizio Dècina is Professor at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy). He equally shared his 40-year career in telecommunications between industry, Telecom Italia, Italtel, and AT&T-Bell Laboratories, and university, University of Rome, Politecnico di Milano and CEFRIEL. Prof. Dècina was the President of the IEEE Communications Society for the years 1994-1995. In 1986 he was appointed Fellow of IEEE, in 1997 he received the IEEE Award in International Communications, and in year 2000 the IEEE Third Millennium Medal.