Keynote Speaker: Professor Dr. Kilnam Chon
Professor Emeritus,
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Keynote Speaker: Professor Dr. Kilnam Chon, Founder of Internet in Asia
Prof. Dr. Kilnam Chon (Born 3 January 1943), Professor Emeritus, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), is a South Korean computer scientist. As a result of his contributions, South Korea became the second country in the world to have the IPv4 network (the Internet), after the United States. He graduated from Osaka University with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1965, and then a Ph.D. in systems engineering from UCLA in 1974. He worked as a computer system designer at Rockwell International and a member of technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory until 1979. After returning to South Korea at the age of 36 in 1979, he worked as a researcher at the Korea Institute of Electronics Technology, which became Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute later. From 1982 to 2008, he was a professor of computer science at KAIST.
Professor Chon contributed to the Internet’s growth in Asia through his extensive work in advancing Internet initiatives, research, and development. He developed the first Internet in Asia, called SDN in 1982, and his pioneering work inspired many others to promote the Internet’s further growth in the region. Chon has worked on networking systems, including the Internet, since the early 1980s.
He founded various regional Internet organizations such as Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG), Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN), and Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Name Forum (APTLD) and Asia Pacific School on Internet Governance. He was also the co-chair of the Coordination Committee of Intercontinental Research Networking (CCIRN).
Keynote Speaker: Prof. Dr. Rohan Samarajiva
Chair,
LIRNEasia, Sri Lanka
Rohan Samarajiva is founding Chair of LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation think tank active across emerging Asia. He was CEO for eight years from its inception in 2004. His most recent co-authored book (2013) is Information lives of the poor: Fighting poverty with technology, published in Burmese, English, French and Spanish. He is a member of the UN Global Pulse Advisory Group on the Governance of Data and Artificial Intelligence. He served on its predecessor, the Data Privacy Advisory Group, since 2015. He serves on the Boards of the University of Moratuwa and the Institute of Technology, University of Moratuwa.
He served as Chair of the ICT Agency, the apex body for information and communication technology within the government of Sri Lanka, in 2018-19. He was one of its founding directors in 2003-05. He was Team Leader at the Sri Lanka Ministry for Economic Reform, Science and Technology (2002-04) responsible for infrastructure reforms, including participation in the design of the USD 83 million e Sri Lanka Initiative. Samarajiva as Director General of Telecommunications in Sri Lanka (1998-99), Honorary Professor at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka (2003-04), Visiting Professor of Economics of Infrastructures at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands (2000-03) and Associate Professor of Communication and Public Policy at the Ohio State University in the US (1987-2000). He served on the Specialty Board in Biomedical Informatics of the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo (2018-22).