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John Apostolopoulos, Ph.D.

Vice President & Chief Technology Officer

Enterprise Networking Business & Innovation Labs

John Apostolopoulos is CTO/VP of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Business, which is Cisco’s largest business, where he drives the technology and architecture direction in strategic areas for the business.

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 (IoT), wireless (ranging from WiFi to emerging 5G), application-aware networking, multimedia networking, indoor-location-based services, connected car, 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 75 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.

Articles

March 11, 2020

NETWORKING

5 Challenges for the Future of Wireless Networking

One of the most satisfying aspects of working at Cisco is tackling a thorny problem of engineering or computational science, and seeing your work reflected in a global standard or a shipping product within a few years. In wireless networking in particular, we have teams on the leading edge of resear…

June 5, 2019

NETWORKING

Improving Networks with Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is changing how we manage networks, and it’s a change we need. Because as we rely more every day on networks and networked applications to keep businesses agile, secure, and competitive, we also need more advanced tools to keep on top of the networks themselves. AI will us ma…

April 9, 2019

NETWORKING

Why Wi-Fi 6 and 5G Are Different: Physics, Economics, and Human Behavior

It is an exciting time in wireless networking. The two most-used wireless technologies in the world are getting an upgrade, and the changes could affect nearly every technology-using human on Earth. Wi-Fi, or local wireless, is undergoing a major advance, to Wi-Fi 6. Cellular, or mobile networking,…

September 20, 2018

NETWORKING

The “what”, “why”, and “how” of intent-based networking

Co-authored by Bob Laliberte, Practice Director & Senior Analyst, ESG Earlier in 2018, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) published its whitepaper on how an intent-based approach to networking was enabling IT and networking teams to address their top operational challenges, including: budget costs,…

July 2, 2018

NETWORKING

Why Your Campus Network Needs Intent

  Contributing author: Matthias Falkner, Distinguished Technical Marketing Engineer    Previous blogs in this series have gone “under-the-hood” of intent-based networking and explored how software-defined networking (SDN) is a foundational element of an intent-based network. In this blog,…

Why is intent-based networking good news for software-defined networking?

In a previous blog post Cisco Engineering teams looked “under the hood” at intent-based networking. A common question we receive is: “What is the relationship of software-defined networking (SDN) to intent-based networking?”  In this blog we: Compare the model of SDN with intent-based networking: H…