We are pleased to announce the results of the recent 2025 Aether Technical Steering Team (TST) elections. Each of these individuals has been elected by the community to a 2-year term on the Aether TST: Gabriel Arrobo (Intel), Ghislain Bourgeois (Canonical), Bilal Saleem (Purdue University) and Tianyi Zhang (Iowa State University).
We also would like to extend a warm thank you to the outgoing TST members: Scott Baker (Intel), Andy Bavier (Intel) and Muhammad Shahbaz (Purdue University). Your past and ongoing dedication and contributions are greatly appreciated!
Aether Project enhancements through community contributions are continuing to accelerate, along with ecosystem support and commercial adoption. We look forward to an exciting year in 2025 and invite current members to continue their support and new members to join us.
About Our New Aether TST Members
Gabriel was reelected to the Aether TST for an additional 2-year term. He has over two decades of experience in telecommunication systems, has published more than 20+ papers, and filed 80+ patent applications related to wireless network communications.
As a contributor on the Aether Project since 2022, Gabriel has collaborated with other working group members on a number of efforts. His Aether contributions include: implemented GTPu Path monitoring in the UPF; enabled TLS by default for the service-based interface (SBI); implemented ZUC algorithm at the NAS; replaced logger in all source code to use ZAP; refactored configuration options in all network functions; drove enablement the of CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions; managed SD-Core components: GitHub repositories, DockerHub and Aether registries; updated SD-Core codebase to use the latest major GO version (1.23); continued reviewing, testing and merging pull requests to maintain the codebase up-to-date; created a (5G) RAN Slicing Management xApp that uses the Cell Configuration and Control (CCC) service model.
Gabriel is a Cloud Software Architect at Intel Labs and is currently working on upgrading the 3GPP release for Aether and is hoping to help drive more community contributions in his role as a member of the TST.
Gabirel holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of South Florida, in addition to an Engineering Degree in Electronics and Telecommunications from Escuela Politecnica Nacional in Quito, Ecuador.
Ghislain is an experienced senior technical architect with a history of success implementing and maintaining telecommunications systems. His background spans from networking protocols, automation, CI/CD, Linux and many other programming languages and debugging tools. He began participating and contributing to the Aether Project in 2023. His initial contribution was improving the API of the SD-Core web console to allow reading device groups and network slices. Since that time, most of his contributions have been related to general maintenance of the SD-Core project such as improving the CI, updating dependencies and fixing bugs.
As a Senior Software Engineer at Canonical, Ghislain works on the Charmed Aether SD-Core product development which aims to provide users a way to easily deploy and operate a private 5G core network. This work requires a stable Aether SD-Core base that is secure and can be maintained well in the future and therefore the work Ghislain and his team are contributing to the Aether Project is focused around testing, bug fixes and improving the maintainability of the code. They also contribute new features periodically.
The main enhancements Ghislain would like to bring to the Aether community are improvements in the maintenance of the project, including the release process and automation of maintenance tasks. Another goal is making it easier for people to join the community and contribute to the project which can be accelerated by improving the code quality, adding tests and improving the tooling that developers can use to successfully contribute to the project.
Ghislain holds a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree from École de Technologie Supérieure located in Montréal, Québec.
Bilal is an experienced research assistant based upon his work in academia at Purdue University. He has published 5 technical research papers, 3 of which were presented at A-star conferences. Bilal also has industry experience in software development, computer networks, and cloud computing with skills in languages such as C++, Python, Go, and Java, and frameworks like Django. He has been contributing to the Aether Project since 2023 and contributed to the design and development of Aether OnRamp, a toolkit for customization of Aether configurations on local hardware. In addition, he added support for OAI RAN, and resolved multiple bugs in the Aether code base.
Bilal is currently focused on making Aether scalable and high-performing, enhancing OnRamp, and adding support for additional RAN simulators. Going forward, he looks forward to collaborating with the Aether community to identify opportunities for enhancing its functionality as well as learning from peers.
Bilal holds a degree in Computer Science from Purdue University and a Bachelor degree from Computer Science and Emerging Sciences in Pakistan.
Tianyi has extensive experience in wireless networking from his research work in academia and contributions to open source projects (including Aether, OAI, srsRAN, Open5GS, and O-RAN Alliance), and has authored numerous publications and received awards related to wireless network communications. His background includes 5G hardware platforms (NI USRP SDR, Ericsson, Skylark, Keysight, Viavi), robotics (ROS, CAD and CAE software), AI/ML software, data analytics (MATLAB, Mathematica, Minitab, OriginLab), and programming languages (Python, C, C++, MATLAB, Qt, CUDA).
Tianyi has participated in the Aether community since 2024 and is the lead representative for the ARA Wireless Living Lab (ARA) to the Aether Project. ARA is a large-scale, real-world experimental infrastructure designed for rural wireless technologies and applications. It is being deployed across the Iowa State University campus, the City of Ames (home to ISU), surrounding research and producer farms, and rural communities in central Iowa, spanning a diameter of over 60 km. ARA serves as a living testbed for smart and connected rural communities, enabling the research and development of rural-focused wireless technologies that deliver affordable, high-capacity connectivity to rural areas and industries such as agriculture.
Together with other members of the ARA, Tianyi has integrated ARA’s field-deployed open source RAN and an Ericsson gNB with Aether SD-Core. They also deployed Aether’s SD-RAN micro-ONOS-based near real-time RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) on the ARA platform to connect to the open source RAN. In addition, Tianyi is collaborating with his advisor, Professor Hongwei Zhang, and other ARA research group members to integrate SD-Core and SD-RAN into the ARA platform. This work supports not only their own research but also the broader ARA user community and the advancement of rural wireless technologies and applications.
Tianyi is currently a PhD candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University and holds an MMS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Boston University and a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
