Wim Sweldens

Wim was most recently the President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Wireless Division, where he led the global development and deployment of LTE 4G technology and oversaw the introduction of the award-winning lightRadio small cell portfolio. Earlier in his role as VP of Network Technology, Wim took the company’s Applications Enablement strategy from paper to practice, allowing service providers to open and leverage their networks for the development of new services and applications. As founder and leader of Alcatel-Lucent Ventures, a strategic new business incubator and investment division inside of Bell Labs, Wim managed the lifecycle - from concept to commercialization - for eight ventures, ranging from enterprise and consumer applications to groundbreaking mobile innovations for operators. Wim also developed several compression algorithms including the one used in the JPEG2000 standard. He authored and co-authored several top cited technical papers, was a member of MIT Technology Review's inaugural class of top young innovators (1999 TR100), and was selected by Global Telecoms Business for its "Power 100 of 2009” list. He is a fellow of the IEEE and member of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences. Wim received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Leuven, Belgium. He lives with his family in New Jersey. You can follow him on twitter @wimsweldens. More detailed information can be found here.