Speakers

Mirjam has been a member of the RIPE community for over twenty years and has served as Senior Community Builder at the RIPE NCC for the past decade. She has a deep knowledge of the Internet community and collaborates regularly with stakeholders from various sectors including technical, security, academic and government. This included establishing and maintaining relationships with regional and local operator communities. Mirjam also created and curated RIPE Labs, a collaborative platform that supports innovative ideas and tools for the community.

Prior to this role, Mirjam worked at the Internet Society as Senior Program Manager where she developed and organised technical workshops primarily in developing countries. During those years, Mirjam intensified her involvement with the IETF where she served as the Chair of the IETF Education Team for over ten years. She is currently a member of the IETF LLC Board of Directors.

Mirjam obtained a Masters of Computer Science at the Technical University Berlin, Germany.

Branimir Rajtar is an experienced senior engineer with a strong track record in the telecommunications industry. He co-founded 5×9 Networks, a company specialising in telco-specific software with vBNG and Lightweight Monitoring System as their main products. He currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer of 5×9 Networks and is also the Chair of NOG.HR.

Rita Ingabire holds a master's degree in information systems and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. She launched her career at MTN Uganda, a wireless network operator, where she progressed from Junior Engineer to senior operational roles. During her tenure, she led the implementation of local and roaming services, integrating technologies from Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE, and Comviva.

After gaining extensive expertise in wireless operations, Rita is now pursuing her PhD at IMDEA Networks, focusing on Opportunistic Architectures with an emphasis on intelligent Cloud Edge design.

Livio is an Electronics and Computer Engineer. He is the Founder and CEO of AIRBEAM, an Italian ISP-WISP. He also serves as a Board member of AIIP, the Italian Association of ISP, focusing on regulatory affairs. Additionally, he is a Board member of PeeringDB, an organisation contributing to the good of the internet community.

Ivan is the perfSONAR senior system engineer for GEANT Operations team and part of the perfSONAR development team at GEANT since 2011.

Currently working as an associate researcher at the Laboratory of Telematics by Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. In his career Ivan had been working for 11 years at the Regionales Rechenzentrum Erlangen of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Ivan holds a master degree in Informatics from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridsk with a specialty in Computer Networks and distributed systems.

More information can be found at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-garnizov-a5968924/

Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Tel Aviv University. Before joining Tel Aviv University, he worked for four years at the Networking Center of Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ. Has published seminal papers in the fields of caching, routing, IP hijack attacks, network measurements, and traffic classification.

In 2004 he incepted the DIMES project for mapping the Internet infrastructure using thousands of lightweight software agents, which revolutionized the field of Internet measurement and mapping. Data gathered by DIMES was used by academians worldwide. In 2014 he established BGProtect, a company that uses the DIMES approach to protect nations and large organizations against IP hijack attacks and provide network infrastructure threat intelligence.

In the recent years he studies usage of Deep Learning for solving networking problems: traffic classification, and routing attack identification.

Ulrich WISSER has joined ICANN Org as Regional Technical Engagement Manager for Europe. His main role is to support ICANN org’s technical engagement efforts in the region (trainings, promote DNS standards and best practices, promote research, …). He reports to Adiel Akplogan, VP Technical Engagement at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer.

Ulrich’s professional career prior to joining ICANN included a 15 year tenure at the Foundation for Internet Infrastructre, the Swedish ccTLD (.SE) registry. He has served as Co-chair of the Centr Tech working group and on the DNS-OARC program committee.

He is a 4th degree black belt and licensed judo instructor.

Jim Cowie is a 2024-2025 research fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and Library Innovation Lab.  His current project is the Internet History Initiative, an effort to preserve and curate the historical datasets that document the Internet's regional evolution, making their stories accessible to future historians and other audiences beyond the Internet's traditional technical core community.

Eliza is a final-year law student at Ukrainian Catholic University, but her interests go far beyond compulsory desk studies. She has been volunteering at the UCU legal clinic as a consultant and war crimes documenter while evaluating the influence of the full-scale invasion on military and internally displaced persons.

Except for the university-related projects, Eliza is a privacy associate with extensive experience in data protection law and general practice as part of Axon.Partners team.

Her interests cover information law, privacy, cybersecurity, and Internet governance. The latter evolved during her participation in SEEDIG Youth School and the SEEDIG 9 conference in Belgrade, where she found like-minded people to present their work at today’s RIPE conference.

Solomiia is a student of a law master’s program at the National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla academy”. She has developed her interest in the field of EU Law, information and media law as well as cybersecurity. Solomiia works at the NGO and provides legal consultations to Ukrainian journalists.

In her spare time, Solomiia also volunteers as a pro bono lawyer for Ukrainian veterans. Together with Eliza, Solomiia participated in the SEEDIG 9 conference in Belgrade, where the idea of the presentation was inspired and born.

Hans Petter has been active in the RIPE community and the Internet industry for over 30 years. He was RIPE Chair from 2014 to 2020 when he took on the position of Managing Director for the RIPE NCC. He has extensive first-hand knowledge of IP address policy development from his time as Chair of the RIPE Address Policy Working Group. Hans Petter was also a member of ICANN's ASO Address Council since its formation in 1999 until 2013, with ten years as Chair and Co-Chair. Later on, he served on the ICANN Nomination Committee for five years.

In 1991 he was one of the founders of Oslonett, one of the first Internet Service Providers in Norway. He worked in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, building networks and Internet services for Schibsted Nett, Scandinavia Online and the city guides Allt om Stockholm and Alt om København before he took on the position as Technical Manager in Tiscali in Norway and was later the Nordic Network Director. Before starting at the RIPE NCC, he worked for Visma for 15 years as Chief Information Security Officer and prior to that as its IT Director. He graduated from the University of Oslo with and Cand. Mag. in Informatics, Mathematics and Physics in 1988.

Expertise: Community development, Data storytelling, Internet Peering and Interconnection, IPv6, Capacity building, Public Policy and Internet Governance.

Hisham Ibrahim is the Chief Community Officer at the RIPE NCC.

He leads the RIPE NCC's engagement efforts to foster a dynamic, inclusive RIPE community. He is responsible for the engagement with the RIPE NCC members, the RIPE community, Internet governance and training services.

Both from a technical and policy background, Hisham has 15 years of experience in the field of Internet technology and its governance.

He has a strong vision of the market, a broad understanding of technologies used on the Internet and a deep knowledge of the European, African and Middle Eastern markets.

Hisham is active on several committees in various Network Operator Groups (NOGs), peering forums, IPv6 task forces and forums across three continents.

Email: Hisham Ibrahim

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Expertise: Internet governance, RIPE NCC measurements and tools, IXPs, RIPE and RIPE NCC, RIPE Labs

Jelena joined the RIPE NCC as a consultant for the South East Europe region. As part of her role, Jelena works on supporting local communities and engaging stakeholders from the SEE region, including RIPE NCC members, governmental agencies, academic institutions and civil society organisations.

In addition to her work in the SEE region, Jelena is interested in Internet measurements and tinkering with RIPE NCC measurement tools like RIPE Atlas and RIS.

Prior to joining the RIPE NCC, Jelena worked as an Outreach Coordinator for Packet Clearing House. At PCH, she mainly focused on providing support to IXPs and expanding PCH’s global infrastructure.

Expertise: Internet governance, academic engagement, online learning, RIPE and the RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) system, RIPE NCC measurements and tools, RIPE Labs

Gergana Petrova is the Community Development Manager at the RIPE NCC. She is responsible for RIPE NCC's engagement with a broad range of stakeholders, including the RIPE NCC membership, the RIPE community, network operators, academia, government, law enforcement, and other Internet stakeholders. Her team organises regional events throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, and sponsors and presents at technical Internet community events. Gergana helps develop national and regional Network Operator Groups (NOGs), Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), national Internet Governance Forums (IGFs), Internet Governance schools and other projects that benefit the Internet in the RIPE NCC's service region.

In her 10+ years at the RIPE NCC, Gergana has also worked in the Communications and External Relations departments. Originally from Bulgaria, Gergana studied for her Bachelors in Germany and obtained her Masters in Business Research in the Netherlands.

Expertise: RIPE NCC and the RIPE community, RIPE NCC Community Projects Fund, Internet governance, community engagement

Alastair Strachan is Junior External Relations Officer at the RIPE NCC. In this role, he works to strengthen the RIPE NCC's engagement with the RIPE NCC membership, the RIPE community, government, law enforcement and other Internet stakeholders. Alastair coordinates the RIPE NCC Community Projects Fund which gives funding to non-commercial projects that benefit the RIPE community.

Prior to his current role, Alastair's career specialised in customer care. Before joining the External Relations team, he worked in the RIPE NCC's Customer Service Department. He studied Design Technology and Computer Aided Design at Paston College and moved from the United Kingdom to The Netherlands in 2010.

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Expertise: IPv6, DNSSEC, Network security, GNU/Linux, Open source software

Ondřej Caletka joined the RIPE NCC in 2020. He works as a technical expert in the Learning and Development team. His main responsibility includes developing and operating the lab environment for training courses and online learning.

Ondřej graduated from Czech Technical University in Prague and worked as network services administrator and developer for the Czech national research and education network CESNET before joining the RIPE NCC. He is also active in local IT communities around open source/free software, and acts as an IPv6 and DNSSEC ambassador, delivering talks and trainings at various events.