WG Chair Biographies

Achilleas Kemos is Programme Officer within the European Commission's Unit dealing with Future Connectivity Systems, with a particular focus on 5G standardisation activities. He has been Commission representative in the key technical bodies related to Internet Protocol (IP) standards issues and IP address allocation policies (IETF and RIPE respectively) since 2012, bridging policy considerations with technology issues.

He is currently co-chairing RIPE's Cooperation Working Group.

In his career with the European Commission, he has dealt with issues on Internet Governance, managing the High level Group on Internet Governance, ITU relations, Network and Information Security, and Digital broadcasting, where he was instrumental in the adoption of the "HD-ready" logo and shaping policy through broad consensus in digital broadcasting issues, notably Interactive DTV interoperability, HDTV interoperability and mobile broadcasting.

He holds a degree in Electronic Engineering from University College London, and post-graduate degrees in European Business Engineering and Project Management from the French Telecommunications University (ENSTB) and Université Rennes 1 respectively.

Swedish-speaking Finn Johan "Julf" Helsingius - now living in Amsterdam and married to an American - was part of the early EUnet mafia, along with people such as Axel Pawlik, Jaap Akkerhuis and Daniel Karrenberg. After a stint as the Chief Technology Officer of the doomed telecom company KPNQwest, he left the corporate world and has been hiding in the IoT startup space for the last 20 years.

He served five years in the ICANN GNSO Council, and is currently the chairman of SIY – the Finnish ISOC national chapter.

Out of his many sins, one was running the anon.penet.fi remailer that gained him his 15 minutes of questionable fame on the front pages of major newspapers, but the thing Julf remembers most fondly was taking a young Linus Torvalds to his first visit to Bell Labs to meet the original UNIX team.

Desiree Miloshevic is an active connector, Internet public servant and a member of the global Internet governance community. She served as Special Adviser to the UN Under-Secretary and Chair of the Internet Governance Multistakeholder Advisory Group, as Trustee of the Board of ISOC and on the Board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

She is currently co-chair of the RIPE Cooperation Working Group.

Desiree has a decade-plus of close and productive interactions with regulators, intergovernmental leaders, academics, artists, and community activists throughout the world. This provides her with a unique set of resources with which to engage the often complex, cross-sectoral challenges of Internet technical coordination and governance.

She also serves on the UK IGF Program Committee, ISOC England UK and ISOC Belgrade Chapter and chairs the board of Share Foundation. When she is not fighting for the free and open Internet, Desiree is working on a DesCon.me conference – an annual IoT Ecology Hackathon for South East Europe which she founded in 2015.