Athul Prasad Email & Phone Number

California, United States

Mountain View, California, Us

North American lead for technology partnerships, strategy, M&A, business investments, and integration across all advanced networking and connectivity products at Samsung. As part of this role, Dr. Prasad's team leads strategic investments, partnerships, and executive engagements with a wide range of startups and scale-ups in North America and (Europe in select cases). Dr. Prasad is also a key contributor to Samsung's overall 6G strategy, and advises senior executives on emerging technologies, avenues for organic and inorganic growth, and areas for business investment.Key Achievements:* Dr. Prasad has led the deployment of 2.5M$+ of capital as part of various strategic investments.* His team led various partnership projects that has resulted in ecosystem development, sales and marketing opportunities for Samsung with key global customers.Key Responsibilities:*Early stage investments and Business Incubation, Investment Road Trips for top executives, Growth Strategy, Ecosystem Development, Due Diligence and Market Research; Domains: 5.5/6G, IoT, AI/ML, MLOps, Mobility, Edge, Cloud, Security, Novel Compute Fabric & Power Devices

The AI-on-RAN Working Group is tasked with defining the radio interface requirements for running AI and Generative AI (GenAI) applications across consumer, enterprise, and government sectors. It aims to benchmark the performance of these applications on 5G and identify new requirements for future 6G systems. Key metrics such as latency, throughput, jitter, packet delay, and encryption needs will be evaluated. The group will review current AI/ML and GenAI techniques, identify challenges, define use cases, and develop lab systems for performance testing. Deliverables include documented surveys, problem statements, test plans, performance evaluations, and system implementation blueprints.More Info: https://ai-ran.org/working-groups/

Espoo, Southern Finland, Fi

In this role, Dr. Prasad was the lead investigator for a multitude of projects related to 5G machine learning and artificial intelligence for physical and medium access control layers (L1/2) of wireless systems.- Dr. Prasad was a Nokia delegate to 3GPP RAN1 (radio physical layer) working group on various 5G release-17 and 5G-Advanced release-18 topics. - Led projects investigating the financial and technological viability of investing in advanced high-altitude Internet platform stations (HAPS), which could enable high-speed, on-demand, and low-latency connectivity to end-users.

Espoo, Southern Finland, Fi

On study leave / 'opintovapaa' from Nokia Finland as part of my MBA studies

Espoo, Southern Finland, Fi

In this senior management role, Dr. Prasad reports to Nokia's chief architect and head of 5G leadership, and was part of the end-to-end 5G leadership program. - Led a team of five people within a matrix organization, from multi-disciplinary background- His key focus was on building business and financial models for disruptive 5G innovations and technology areas with significant potential for value creation, leading to Nokia's leadership in value capture. - Leveraged unique background in technology development and corporate finance to build complex models for estimating product-market mix.- Dr. Prasad also contributed to the long-term e2e technology strategy through his unique and in-depth insights into the technology evolution, and a keen understanding of the global telecom market. - He also contributed to the business and technology portfolio management functions, in close collaboration with Nokia's key customers and industry partners.

Espoo, Southern Finland, Fi

Led several research projects and activities within Nokia and externally within the European Union, in disruptive areas such as micro-operators and end-to-end system design for hyper-scalable systems in 5G. - Led a team of 5 scientists within a matrix organization, tasked with developing new technology and related intellectual property, build digital twin platform for early-stage ideation and proof-of-concept- One of his key focus areas was the efficient and mass-delivery of immersive media content (Virtual / Augmented / Mixed Reality), thereby disrupting the media & entertainment industry in the 5G era. - Led projects investigating new technology breakthroughs which was instrumental in enabling Nokia's entry into new verticals and markets. During this time, Dr. Prasad has also partnered extensively with technology startups for joint technology development and deployment.- As a highly respected industry expert in 5G, Dr. Prasad was also the technical manager of the ~8 M€ European Union funded project called 5G-Xcast, and was part of EU's 5G technology board (formed as part of 5G-PPP horizon 2020 framework).

Espoo, Southern Finland, Fi

Worked on METIS-II project, developing synchronous control functions for 5G Radio Access Networks, as well as on MAC, RRM, Mobility, QoS and Energy Savings related topics on 5G. (Moved to Nokia Networks, formerly Nokia Siemens Networks / NSN (until Jan. 2016) and moved to the Wireless Advanced Technologies Department, Mobile Radio Research Lab in Nokia Bell Labs, as part of internal group transfer.

Espoo, Southern Finland, Fi

Worked on 5G Radio Access Systems Research and Standardization Group at Nokia (started in Technologies, and moved to Nokia Networks in April 2015, as part of internal group transfer), on fifth generation (5G) system enhancements, related topics, as well as on European research projects related to 5G radio access networksKey contributor to METIS-I project, which was one of the biggest consortium of industrial and academic researchers working on 5G RAN design, and pre-standardization.

Cambridge, Ma, Us

Dr. Prasad was a candidate of the Sloan Fellows' MBA program (class of 2020) while being on a sabbatical break from Nokia. He was mainly focusing on the intersection of technology, innovation, and business. As a key member of the wider MIT community, Dr. Prasad was also the VP of the MIT Data Analytics and Operations Management clubs.Main Academic Focus Area: Leveraging MIT's immense breadth of knowledge and my own depth of expertise in Data Science (analytics, machine learning and AI) for inventing novel means of creating economic value and capturing financial value within modern innovative organizationsOther Focus Areas: Data driven operations, general management, corporate, venture capital and private equity finance, mergers and acquisitions, organizational design, strategy and entrepreneurship, and data-driven marketing analytics for product design and managementAs a passionate entrepreneur, Dr. Prasad is also contributing towards developing advanced machine learning algorithms to augment disruptive MIT technology startups related to supply chain risk management, eCommerce, and virtual assistant platforms.

Tokyo, Jp

Transitioned to a role leading technology creation and negotiation with various stakeholders in order to maximize the impact on product implementation and licensing revenues. Standards delegate - attending 3GPP RAN working group meetings.

Espoo, Southern Finland, Fi

Transitioned from product management to early-stage ideation and technology creation role.- Worked on creating new technology innovations and related intellectual property in the area of distributed multi-channel allocation problem in local area networks as part of the optimized local access research group.- In collaboration with the 3GPP radio access systems research group, contributing towards 3GPP RAN2 standardization activities of Nokia - on topics related to power-efficient mobile devices.- The technology that I created has been successfully in various mobile devices, leading to significant licensing revenues.- Gained expertise in enhancing digital twin platforms and building complex simulation platforms, using robust statistical modeling.- Published various research articles in top academic journals and conference proceedings.- Dual role of research scientist at Aalto University (as part of my masters and doctoral / PhD studies) and research consultant / technology co-creator at Nokia Research Center

Shenzhen, Guangdong, Cn

Worked in various roles starting as a software engineer and later evolving to a product manager for one of Huawei's most successful products. As part of this role Dr. Prasad had the opportunity to work with 100+ customers from 70+ countries, deploying high-impact and highly critical products.- Executed various strategies to overcome the classical overgrown trunk problem, by motivating key customers to upgrade to the latest root versions, thereby minimizing significant costs due to maintenance of a large number of branches.- Developed and executed turnaround strategy to minimize load for R&D from an exceeding amount of customer requests related to product features by working with the documentation and customer support team to ensure easy availability of product user guides.- Data-driven product management enabled significant overhead reduction for the R&D teams, thereby enabling heightened focus on value creation through product development.- Developed key strategies for reducing product dependence on underlying hardware platforms, thereby reducing software development costs.- End-to-end software product development, testing and deployment expertise - in collaboration with various stakeholders such as test and field-force engineers.- On-boarded and mentored highly-skilled fresh graduates and played a key role in their journey towards professional success.- Based out of Kigali, Rwanda, in 2008 as part of a brownfield network deployment with a key customer.

Doctor Of Science - D. Sc. (Tech); Master Of Science - M.Sc. (Tech), Electrical Engineering

Master Of Business Administration - Mba, Finance And Data Science

Bachelor Of Technology - B.Tech, Electronics And Communications Engineering

Executive Education - Stanford Lead: Corporate Innovation Certificate

Business Analytics Certificate, Data Science