NCC 2026 Speakers

Name	Affiliation	Profile	Bio	Title	Abstract
Namrata Vaswani	Iowa State University, USA	Profile	Namrata Vaswani is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Anderlik Professor of Engineering at Iowa State University. She also holds a courtesy professorship in the Department of Mathematics. She received a Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Maryland, College Park and a B.Tech. from IIT Delhi in 1999. Her research is in statistical machine learning and signal processing, and in imaging (MRI and video analytics). Vaswani is also the director of the CyMath K-12 math tutoring and support program at Iowa State. She is a recipient of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Best Paper Award (2014), the University of Maryland ECE Distinguished Alumni Award (2019), and the Iowa State Mid-Career Achievement in Research Award (2019). Vaswani is an AAAS Fellow (class of 2023) and an IEEE Fellow (class of 2019).		Mathematical ML and ML for (better) Math: Alternating GD and Minimization (AltGDmin) for Secure Federated Low Rank Matrix Learning and MRI, and Cy-Math First Prof Namrata Vaswani will introduce AltGDmin and its Byzantine-resilient variant for vertically federated low-rank matrix learning, highlighting robustness to adversarial nodes and applications such as dynamic MRI, recommender systems, and efficient LLM fine-tuning. Then she will discuss about ML-enabled support for K-12 math learning through the CyMath program and tools like ALEKS and Khan Academy to improve foundational skills and STEM readiness.
Lajos Hanzo	University of Southampton, UK	Profile	Lajos Hanzo is a Chair Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Southampton, UK. He has co-authored 20+ IEEE and IET books on wireless communications, published 2000+ research contributions at IEEE Xplore, and presented keynote lectures worldwide. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, IEEE, IET, and EURASIP, and has received numerous awards including the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Technical Field Award.	Plenary Speaker	Quantum Information Processing, Sensing and Communications: Their Myths, Realities and Futures The recent advances in quantum information processing, sensing and communications are surveyed with the objective of identifying the associated knowledge gaps and formulating a roadmap for their future evolution. Since the operation of quantum systems is prone to the deleterious effects of decoherence, which manifests itself in terms of bit-flips, phase-flips or both, the pivotal subject of quantum error mitigation is reviewed both in the presence and absence of quantum coding. The state-of-the-art, knowledge gaps and future evolution of quantum machine learning are also discussed, followed by a brief discourse on quantum radar systems and briefly hypothesizing about the feasibility of integrated sensing and communications in the quantum domain. Finally, we conclude with a set of promising future research ideas in the field of ultimately secure quantum communications with the objective of harnessing ideas from the classical communications field.
Francois Baccelli	INRIA and ENS, France	Profile	François Baccelli is a researcher at INRIA and a professor at ENS Paris. He is a pioneer in stochastic geometry and its applications to wireless networks, internet traffic modeling, and quantum communications. He is an IEEE Fellow and has received the ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award and the IEEE W. R. Bennett Prize.	Plenary Speaker	[Abstract / Talk details coming soon]
Jayanthi Sivaswamy	IIIT Hyderabad, India	Profile	Jayanthi Sivaswamy is a Professor at IIIT Hyderabad and Dean of Research & Development. Her research spans medical image analysis, computer vision, and image processing. She has led several national projects in healthcare AI and received awards including the NASI-Reliance Industries Platinum Jubilee Award and fellowship of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.	Keynote Speaker	[Abstract / Talk details coming soon]